The blogger behind MetroRiderLA says the competition from professional transportation blogs and the need to make money — plus plain old blog burnout — nudged him to call a time out.
I’ve been finding it hard to compete with the full-time bloggers (and full fledged journalists) over at The Bottleneck Blog and Streetsblog LA. I simply do not have the luxury of time or the journalistic skillz (to say nothing of the monetary incentive) that those platinum playboys do to offer that kind of in-depth, compelling coverage of “the transit oriented lifestyle”. Also, for whatever reason, I’m just kind of sick of blogs in general right now. I used to check the LA blogs and transit blogs daily, but for the last month or so I haven’t felt compelled to read or comment on them. Blog burnout.The time for hiatus has come because of all of this, and I can’t be sure how long it will last. Ideally I’d like to find a way to reorient the blog in a way that will address a niche that the other two major L.A. transit blogs don’t cover. My vision for MetroRiderLA has always been to focus on the “lifestyle” of being a transit rider in Los Angeles as opposed to the politics of the mess. But unfortunately, to truly cover the lifestyle in the way that I have imagined would require a lot of time and energy that I don’t currently have.
That was yesterday. Today, he came back to rant about Metro's new website design.