BLOGGER: Jay Sears
FEATURED BLOG(S):
MyRye.com
TWITTER:
@MyRye

Another week, another really interesting conversation with a great local blogger — this time Jay Sears of MyRye.com. The biggest takeaway from this week’s chat? A blog can truly be a powerful community-organizing platform, when its power is wielded effectively. In a small town in New York, Jay Sears was able to take a neighborhood concern and engage his fellow citizens via his blog, yielding tangible results. There are those that think that blogs simply don’t happen– not effectively, anyway– in smaller towns and communities like Rye. MyRye.com proves that they do — while Brooklyn may be the ‘bloggiest’ community in the country, there are certainly bloggers in smaller towns and communities that are finding real success. Community organizers and community-minded bloggers can certainly take a page from Sears’ playbook.

Esther Brown, Community Manager at Outside.in: Tell me a little bit about yourself, Jay.

Jay Sears, Publisher of MyRye.com: We have lived in Rye for nine years. We moved from the Upper West Side of Manhattan after our second son was born. I live on in the Bradford park area of Rye with my wife, Lauren Rosen, and our three boys Ethan, Noah and Jonathan. Lauren serves as the co-president of the Osborn School PTO, one of three elementary schools in Rye. She is a social worker and is currently working as the Student Assistance Counselor at Eastchester High School. I help run an online advertising company in New York City.

Jay Sears

Why did you choose to move to Rye?

Rye has a lot of refugees from the Upper West Side and Upper East Side. There also seem to be a lot of ex-pats in Rye: lots of Japanese, British and Dutch who come to work in New York City and find Rye to be a great place to raise their families. The public education is excellent. Rye is also on the shores of the Long Island Sound, and about 20 percent of our six square miles are open space: city parks, county parks, golf courses, athletic fields- some are quite unique, like The Rye Marshlands Conservancy.

Rye is one of the places John Jay grew up in, and there’s a tremendous amount of American history in Rye. For instance, the Post Road, which was built in the 1700s. One of the things we’ve written about are the different mile markers on the Post Road– our readers have been great in helping us locate the hard-to-find ones.

Why do you blog, and how did you start?

MyRye.com is a web site for Rye, New York enthusiasts— people who love living here and others who are connected to Rye City. We write—and our readers have contributed over 4,000 comments—on Rye art, Rye events, Rye food, Rye city council, Rye green issues, Rye history, Rye people, Rye schools as well as other pertinent events and happenings around Rye.

The site began in 2006 when neighbors in the Bradford Park area of Rye gathered to ask the city for a four-way STOP sign at the intersection of Florence Avenue and Bradford. It’s a lot of work to convince the city that it’s a good idea to install a four-way STOP sign, so we thought we’d document the whole process, from talking to the mayor and the city engineer to watching the city conduct their traffic studies.

We posted the letters signed by the 40+ neighbors and then documented— hopefully with some seriousness, humor and aplomb— the process of working with City Hall and a lot of others. I think that having the campaign out in an open place like a website made the issue very visible, and everyone was realy diligent about it. After eight months we got our STOP sign and MyRye.com was on a roll.

For the first year or so, it wasn’t more than a handful of people that knew about the website. We now have over 3,000 visitors each month in a city with only 5,000 homes.

MyRye.com began publishing on January 1, 2006– over four years ago. For the last couple of years we have been publishing every weekday.

What is the hardest or most challenging part about blogging?

Occasionally you panic that you have run out of stories—that there will simply never be any more stories emanating from a small city of 15,000 residents. Just when all hope seems to be lost the flood gates open—ideas flow, email and phone calls arrive, comments are posted—in the end there never was and never will be a shortage of material.

What is the best part about blogging?

The best part about MyRye.com is when residents use the web site as a platform to discuss an issue. We can start things off, but it’s the residents that engage with the site and each other that make the site vibrant.

What was the most popular post on your blog (views, comments, reactions)? Why do you think it was so popular? What post are you most proud of?

Many “hot button” issues from of Rye City Council receive a lot of community attention. Our stories are so varied—from Rye residents such as John Thain and Alex Rodriguez—to the annual Rye Little League Parade—to possible environmental malfeasances at the Jay Heritage site to the closing of the Durland Scout Center on Milton Point—it is too hard to pick a favorite.

What do you do to promote your blog?

MyRye.com has grown to over 3,000 readers a month solely via word-of-mouth.

Of course, there were also events and happenings that we wrote about that were newsworthy in their own right, which then caused the website to get more attention. For instance, in 2007, when the website was 16 months old, we had terrible flooding in Rye, and Rye became a FEMA disaster zone. Lots of people had damage, millions of dollars in property damage, in fact. We were able to have videos and photos up on the website pretty quickly, and because the website also has a unique voice, I think it can be a pretty effective place to galvanize everyone and bring people together.

What has blogging done for you, personally? Professionally?

With a day job in lower Manhattan, I still manage to be engaged with the local Rye community.

What have you learned through blogging?

It takes a village. MyRye.com is set apart from other local media because of the engagement of the community through both contributed articles and comments on published stories.

I’ve had the real privilege of getting to know a lot of the people in Rye City who really care about what’s going on here– they show up for the various public meetings and are really dedicated. It’s been a real honor for me to be so engaged with so many of these folks and the caliber of people in Rye is, frankly, remarkable– in that so much of Rye is made up and driven by people like that, who care about their community and volunteer and put in so much of their own time.

What are your future plans for MyRye.com?

Hyperlocal publishing will be one of the next great areas of innovation for the Internet. Very soon, MyRye.com will be releasing a mobile application (an iPhone app to begin) that will be “location aware” and let users rate and submit comments (written and audio) and pictures of all things Rye such as restaurants and businesses.

When MyRye.com readers go crazy for the Maple Tree Burger at Town Dock restaurant, they can take a picture of the burger, rate the restaurant and instantly share this delicious insight with the entire MyRye.com community.

We are also renovating our home in Rye with the help of Rye local Craig Simandl of BHK Builders and Judy Martin of Rye’s Green Home Consulting. We plan to report on the renovation including several green initiatives such as cellulose insulation, geothermal heating and cooling and solar electric. By sharing hopefully we will encourage other people to share their Rye home renovation stories, especially as people begin to incorporate green aspects into their homes.

MyRye.com will always be “all Rye, all the time” and great champions of the place 15,000 of us are lucky enough to call home.

If the lessons from Sears and MyRye.com are any indication, we’re reminded that it truly takes a village to raise a blog. We also come to realize that a blog, in and of itself, is not a very powerful thing. Rather, a blog is a vehicle, a platform that can be used as a means to an end. And, when channeled effectively, a blog can indeed be a very powerful tool. After all, if a blogger posts in the forest, is anyone around to comment?

P.S.: If you’d like to be featured in our ‘Bloggers We Love’ series (or you’d like to nominate your favorite local blogger(s) for inclusion), we’d love to hear from you! Simply send an email to esther[at]outside[dot]in.

P.P.S.: As you’ve probably noticed, this week we’re doing our ‘Bloggers We Love,’ post in a more straight-forward interview format. Just a little change of pace – we hope you enjoy.

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