Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
Steve Shanafelt, a current Mountain Xpress contributor and former arts and entertainment editor, has announced that he’s planning to either hand off, or shut down completely, a hyperlocal website he founded two years ago for Spartanburg, S.C.
The site is called the Spartanburg Spark. Shanafelt drew up on his experience with Xpress to build site, filling it with great content about the local community, from happenings in politics and music, to news about what local bloggers were up to. Shanafelt even took inspiration from Xpress‘ tagline, “Local Matters,” for the Spark’s tagline, “Because Spartanburg Matters.”
The Spark was filled with vibrant content, and really tapped into the local community. But now Shanafelt says the website is in transition. Here’s what he writes:
After two years of running this do-it-yourself experiment in community-oriented, utterly informal, financially laughable, hyperlocal journalism, I’m looking for someone else — or a group of others — to take over the Spark. I’m leaving town to take on another project, and I can’t keep the Spark project going if I’m not actually in town to make it work. Which means that either someone else needs to step up, demonstrate to me that they understand the mission and can take the reins, or that the Spark project ends on September 1, after two overwhelmingly awesome years.
For the past several months, Shanafelt has been contributing more regularly at Xpress after stepping down from his arts and entertainment editor’s post and working part-time as a forum moderator and freelancing some other projects for the paper. It will be fun to watch him tackle his next projects. Shanafelt is a smart journalist who does great work.
I'll happily take "smart journalist who does great work."
Ending the Spark project has been a mixed bag — I would have liked to have handed it off to someone, but not if they didn't understand the mission — but it has easily been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.
The Spark's other main contributor, Christopher George, recently started a Spark-like project over at FlyingOskar.com, for those of you who want to keep an eye on the happenings over in the Hub City.