Hyperlocal blogging is usually considered a grassroots affair. So when the Seattle P-I announced plans this summer to recruit volunteer bloggers to cover Seattle’s neighborhoods, it looked liked it was competing – intentionally or not – with hyperlocal blogs such as the West Seattle Blog, MyBallard, Capitol Hill Seattle and Wallyhood, all started by and for members of the community.

The P-I bills its neighborhood news blogs as an opportunity for people who have considered starting a local blog to participate in the trend. The P-I has hosted reader blogs for years; about 150 reader bloggers write about a variety of topics, from parenting to dining. The neighborhood bloggers won’t be paid, but the P-I will offer them free classes in blogging, social media, photography and investigative journalism.

The first of the P-I’s neighborhood blog series, In Queen Anne, went live July 29. Ten Queen Anne residents with a variety of backgrounds and experiences write the blog, which has already attracted a number of comments. Contributor Chelsea Nesvig says her love of writing and Queen Anne motivated her to participate. “I’m hoping (the blog) becomes all that it’s capable of and that it leads to more and more opportunities to write,” she says.

The P-I decimated its staff in March when it stopped publishing the print newspaper and became an online-only news outlet. Bringing aboard new writers to create free content has not gone unnoticed by existing local bloggers.

Jordan Schwartz of the Wallyhood blog says he doesn’t think the P-I blogs will be serious competition for Seattle’s hyperlocal sites, which are already well-established with loyal followings. Instead, much of the criticism of the P-I program lies in the fact that the Hearst-owned P-I opted to imitate existing neighborhood blogs rather than establish relationships with them.

“Our concern is that the P-I decided not to work with existing neighborhood sites and isn’t fostering the creation of new sites,” says Justin Carder of Neighborlogs, a hosting service for Capitol Hill Seattle and 30 other hyperlocal sites across the country. “Instead, the P-I is trying to own the relationship with the community so it can increase its ad impressions on content it isn’t paying for. So our main concern is about the good community sites that will never get the chance to develop.”

Vanessa Ho, community editor for SeattlePI.com, says user-generated content has long been an essential part of the Web site, and the addition of neighborhood blogs is an expansion of those efforts. After the P-I posted a call for bloggers, they were flooded with responses, she says.

“They could start a blog on their own, and there are some excellent ones in Seattle that have started that way,” Ho says. “But some people don’t have the time to nurture a blog from scratch, or they don’t have a journalist’s background. That’s where we can help. We can help organize teams of neighborhood bloggers so that blogging isn’t massively time-consuming. We’re showcasing their work on our site, which has an audience of nearly 4 million readers. We’re also teaching people best practices on reporting, writing and blogging, which are skills they can take anywhere.”

Local bloggers such as Tracy Record of West Seattle Blog see a big difference between their news sites and the P-I neighborhood blogs. “Some people choose to write about their neighborhoods as a labor of love, some do it as a hobby, and they choose many different formats,” Record says. “What we are doing is a professional, commercial, journalist-run, online-only news operation.”

Ultimately, the readers will decide which sites succeed, and hyperlocal bloggers are optimistic that their sites will continue to thrive. “Community blogs are a bit different than reader blogs, because they draw their legitimacy from their connection to the community,” says Schwartz of the Wallyhood blog. “If readers have the sense that some ‘downtown media’ is trying to create local, neighborhood blogs that compete with homegrown neighborhood blogs, I think they’re going to run into perception problems.”

Ho says she doesn’t see the P-I blogs as competition for existing neighborhood blogs: ”There’s a lot of room for news and conversation, and choice is good for readers.”

Helen Pitlick has been a student in the MCDM program since spring 2009. She works with social media as an intern at Foodista.com, and in her spare time, she reviews craft beer.