BLOGGER: Steve Shanafelt
FEATURED BLOG(S): The Spartanburg Spark
TWITTER: @TheSpark
FACEBOOK: The Spark on Facebook
YOUTUBE: The Spark on YouTube

SPARTANBURGSPARK.COM

What happens when a seasoned media professional moves to a new town and decides to start a hyperlocal blog?

Some pretty amazing things, as it turns out: a community gets its long-anticipated downtown café and somebody finally starts taping the City Council meetings, for example. Those inspiring nuggets are just a few of the reasons we’ve chosen to use this week’s Bloggers We Love post to introduce you to SpartanburgSpark.com (“The Spark”), the hyperlocal blog that writer and editor Steve Shanafelt launched after moving from Asheville, NC to Spartanburg, SC.

Having worked for many years at Asheville’s Mountain Xpress, Shanafelt felt it was time for a new venture in a new town. Spartanburg seemed like the right spot: an agreeable town with a serious dearth of local news and a lack of sufficient opportunities for community members to converge and discuss Spartanburg issues and happenings.

Steve Shanafelt, founder of The Spartanburg Spark

“When we decided to move, Spartanburg was one of these fantastic places— it just seemed to be crying out for some project to stitch it together,” Shanafelt says. “I’m continually surprised by how good that instinct turned out to be.”

COMMUNITY MATTERS

And so, in August 2008, The Spark was born, providing Spartanburg-centric news, as well as online forums, an events calendar, a music calendar, regular podcasts (a new feature that The Spark community has embraced, even though Shanafelt & Co. are unabashedly inexperienced– yet honest, funny and compelling– podcasters), a reader soapbox, a blogroll (SparkleCityBlogs – Spartanburg gets its nickname from a 1950′s rockabilly group) and a curated page of local headlines from other sources, such as local Etsy listings (HubCityHeadlines – Spartanburg is also called the Hub City, because it was once a major regional transportation hub).

Shanafelt borrowed much of his inspiration for the site from Mountain Xpress, whose mission statement charges that the paper exists “to build community and strengthen democracy by serving an active, thoughtful readership at the local level – where the impact of citizen action is greatest.”

As we mentioned above, one way The Spark lives up to this ideal is by filming all Spartanburg City Council meetings and making them available on YouTube, something that was born out of necessity, as the City Council didn’t have the resources to accomplish this itself and, evidently, no local mainstream media source had used its resources to do this, either. It took a blogger to bring the City Council to the people, which further solidifies something we believe to be true: when mainstream media sources no longer have the resources to effectively cover their beats, oftentimes local bloggers step up and fill the gap, providing an invaluable public service to their communities, and one we’re honored to celebrate in our own small way.

Shanafelt doesn’t bring home the bacon via The Spark (rather, he continues to freelance), however he won’t diminish it by calling it a hobby. Instead, he refers to it as a “community project,” which is appropriate, considering his focus has been on the Spartanburg community from the very beginning, and community donations also allow The Spark to pay for itself.

“We started off like every other similar project, with ten people reading, and it’s been a steep progression from there,” Shanafelt says. “We’re now at about 1000 readers per day. What we’re talking about is super local—the City of Spartanburg—and there’s a cap on how many people would ever be interested in that— but we’re trying to make it so those people have access to some information that they care about.”

MAKING AN IMPACT

In a city of fewer than 40,000 residents—even fewer of who live in the downtown area, which is where The Spark focuses—Shanafelt and his collaborators are clearly making an impact, and the response from the Spartanburg community has been overwhelmingly positive thus far.

“One of the things that’s been bizarre – in a good way – is the high level of community support,” Shanafelt says. “I tend to look at Spartanburg as a place that has all this dried grass, and if you strike a match, you can start a fire,” he adds, alluding to the site’s name.

Shanafelt uses many different channels to build community on his site, including social media tools, but for him one of the most exciting initiatives has been a series that runs on Wednesdays, called the Big Idea, wherein Shanafelt suggests ‘big ideas,’ and lets the community run with them.

“It’s like a brainstorming topic,” Shanafelt says. “Like, ‘what if Spartanburg had a dog park?’ Here [in Spartanburg]. That’s a novel idea.”

A few of these Big Ideas have actually been propelled forward by the community and have become realities. For instance, Shanafelt and his collaborators have lobbied for downtown café – which sounds pretty simple, but it’s something that doesn’t exist in downtown Spartanburg. Sure, there’s a Starbucks with Wi-Fi in greater Spartanburg, but it’s not downtown, and it’s not the community hub that Shanafelt and the community have envisioned, either.

“Even though there are colleges here, realtors say that [a downtown café] would never work,” Shanafelt says. “After complaining for several blog posts, someone from within the community decided to start a downtown bakery/café/bookstore, and it’ll be open in a couple of months. I’m sure that people have been talking about a downtown café for longer than we’ve been around, but now [that The Spark exists], there’s a place where the community can talk to itself. People are just excited and appreciative about being able to talk about zoning or any of the topics that we discuss, which is an incredibly rewarding thing. You can write something— and then you can get a flood of reactions over something that’s relatively simple! People in the community have been desperate to talk about these things and have not had that forum before. People in larger cities kind of take that [forum] for granted.”

CONTROVERSY

Of course, this isn’t to say that Shanafelt and his collaborators never face any negative feedback from their readers.

“Spartanburg is a traditionally conservative area with a very strong Libertarian bent– meaning, ‘all government is bad, taxes of any form are bad, spending money on public education is bad,’ – and there’s also a very strong affinity for gun rights,” Shanafelt says. “We wrote an opinion piece questioning the necessity of a bill— now a law— allowing concealed weapon permit holders to bring guns on school property and carry them into bars.”

Shanafelt says that while the opinion piece did garner a lot of disagreement from the community, he’s mostly been struck by how few of these negative incidents have occurred.

“My background is in arts reviews, and I faced a lot more negative or opinionated feedback then. We’re talking about some relatively serious things [on The Spark], but most of the stuff we’re writing about isn’t particularly partisan.”

ENCOURAGING BLOGGERS

Shanafelt says he likes to think of Spartanburg as “an anachronistic movie about the 1990s – a place that’s walking 15 years in the past in a lot of ways, culturally and awareness-wise,” but qualifies this by adding that “South Carolina, you know – it gets sort of dismissed as well, but there are so many astonishing things going on here that are flying under people’s radars. It’s getting better, and part of our job is to foster that.”

To this end, Shanafelt created SparkleCityBlogs, an extensive blogroll of Spartanburg-based blogs. Shanafelt writes a weekly update on the goings-on in the Sparkle City blogosphere, and also looks for ways to encourage passionate Spartanburg residents to start their own blogs.

Still, in spite of his passion for local blogs and community journalism, Shanafelt maintains a realistic view about blogging and about the blog as a platform.

“We’ve certainly gone out of our way to get certain individuals to start [blogging], but we’ve had limited success with that. You can’t sort of force that, somehow. Also, a lot of blogs are boring – but you’ve got to try! You’ve got to give them a chance to shine,” Shanafelt says, adding that blogs have a natural lifespan—which isn’t shameful at all:

“Blogs die for the same reason that any project dies,” Shanafelt says. “Something gets someone mad or passionate about that subject, and eventually people move on.  If someone has a blog that’s passionate for a while, why is that invalid? I wouldn’t want someone to feel obligatory about something they’re not passionate about anymore.”

For our part, we hope Shanafelt and his collaborators at The Spark keep on blogging as long as it’s still fun for them—and by the looks of things, that could ensure we’ll be hearing from them for a long time to come. Or, as Shanafelt put it:

“It gives a level of intellectual nourishment to me that people are out here doing this— it’s real, and it’s honest, which is something that’s increasingly rare in the world.”

STEVE SHANAFELT’S TIPS FOR BLOGGERS:

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.