I got this email from VCU School of Mass Communications professor Jeff South. It took me a while to realize that our readers might be interested in the results. Especially, considering that you are just as cutting edge as we are!
Here’s the email:

Greetings from LA, where I am at “Media Re:Public,” a conference convened by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The focus here is on participatory media — especially citizen journalism. And guess which city ranked No. 1 for citizen journalism Web sites? Richmond, by far and away. In fact, I’m at a session right now about a report that the Project for Excellence in Journalism has just completed on such sites. It says:

Richmond, Virginia, was the most developed community of citizen journalism sites in the sample. Richmond has 16 citizen journalism sites, 10 of which were citizen neighborhood news sites, two were neighborhood blog sites, two were blog sites that addressed the Richmond area, one was a news aggregator for Richmond, and one was a blog aggregation site. Of particular interest are the neighborhood sites that have very similar “About Us” statements and that link to each other. According to a statement on the Greater Fulton News (http://greaterfultonnews.org/about-this-site/), the neighborhood sites can be traced to John Murden, who set up the Church Hill People’s News (http://chpn.net/news/ in August 2004.

And, A big thank you to John Murden, who with my partner Kory, got this site up and ready to go back in August.

John Sarvay over at Buttermilk & Molasses covers the report in more detail.