WKRN-TV shutters VolunteerVoters.com
Young Broadcasting’s WRKN-TV in Nashville has terminated Adam Kleinheider, effectively ending a remarkably successful experiment in blog aggregation, VolunteerVoters.com — lovingly known in Tennessee political circles as v-squared. I’m sure nobody is happy about this, and it should rightly be viewed as a victim of what’s happening to mainstream media companies, and not about the quality of the political aggregator. It is, in my opinion, the type of site that local media companies need to be running for a whole lot of reasons.
As one commenter to Adam’s last post wrote, “If a mainstream news organization can’t sustain an objective political dialogue online, then I fear the horizon holds nothing good.” The site got respectable traffic numbers, but beyond the reach, it served a valuable function in the political journalism firmament in the state of Tennessee. I doubt the vacuum will exist for long.
