Gordon Chaffin is a freelance journalist who focuses on infrastructure and traffic news and insights for Street Justice. You can support independent journalism by subscribing to Gordon’s newsletter. He’s offering a 20% discount to THIH readers. –Maria Helena Carey
What I Heard at Open Streets DC
As most, if not all, of you know, DC closed three miles of Georgia Avenue NW to car and transit traffic for four hours on Saturday, October 5th. The stretch, from Shaw up to Petworth, included live music, participatory games, a bouncy castle, booths set up by GA Ave businesses, food, and tables of info and swag from government agencies. Mayor Bowser directed DDOT over the summer to produce this first-of-its-kind-in-DC event. Other cities in the U.S., and especially Latin America, do these open streets events regularly.
I heard recommendations that DC should do something like this every weekend, every month, or just once per year. A consensus opinion was that the length of the closure was excessive, and the event felt empty in many parts due to non-participating businesses. Everyone I talked to thought DDOT should have allowed transit buses to get through, and/or open cross streets with police controlling traffic.
Your Neighborhood Yahoo! Groups are Dying
“Yahoo announced on Wednesday that it is winding down its long-running Yahoo Groups site. As of October 21, users will no longer be able to post new content to the site, and on December 14 Yahoo will permanently delete all previously posted content.”
Many civically-engaged DC-area residents are worried this means the end of their neighborhood’s listserv. Many, perhaps most, of DC’s neighborhood listservs are run off of Yahoo! Groups. There seem to be efforts to archive the posts and some group moderators are considering migrating their operations to other services that provide similar email group/online chat functions.
Outside of DC’s geography-based Yahoo! groups, it seems like there were lots of niche topic- and hobby-based communities on the platform. Getting away from email or out of the email paradigm is one choice groups can make. Though, as an email newsletter, Street Justice would prefer you not delete Gmail or Outlook.
New Schedule for Street Justice News
I’ve decided to switch Street Justice over to a 3x/week schedule for paying subscribers. All subscribers will continue to get weekly editions on Sunday. This comes after a request for feedback and overwhelming support for the change.
As always, please tell anyone you know in the DC area — co-workers, friends, family — about Street Justice. This news operation grosses $12K/yr. I’m depending on you for referrals, feedback, and ideas to get that to $60K-$70K — where I can pay taxes and an editor, and move out of a shipping container into a normal apartment of some kind.
New Schedule
- Mondays, 8 AM ET: Paid Subscriber Edition
- Wednesdays, 8 AM ET: Paid Subscriber Edition
- Fridays, 8 AM ET: Paid Subscriber Edition
- Saturday Mornings: Community Service Project and/or Office Hours: I’ll soon be setting up in public spaces, like Lucy’s advice booth, and holding office hours/tabling. Or, I will be doing community service projects where you can join. E.g., cleaning the Florida Ave NE bike lanes of yard waste. Let me know if you have an idea for this!
- Sundays, 10 AM ET: All Subscriber Edition w/ excerpts and maybe a short free-for-all story