Nashvillest: Belmont alums build following for quirky blog bout Music City

Nearly one year ago, Belmont alumnae Christy Frink and Morgan Levy had an idea and some time on their hands.

They created a blog about Nashville and within the first two weeks, Nashvillest received between 400-600 page views.

Four months later they won Best Local Blog from the Nashville Scene and were again featured in the People edition in February – quite the venture for a pair who had at best merely dabbled in blogging.

The origins of  Nashvillest lie in a semester Frink spent in Washington D.C. While in the process of trying to get a feel for the city, she found a blog called the DCist, which covers news and culture items for the D.C. area.

Upon arriving back in Nashville, Frink sensed a need.

“I read DCist, got a lot of ideas and came back and Morgan and I complained that Nashville didn’t have anything like that,” Frink said.

Levy saw the function that a Nashville blog might have served for them while still at Belmont.

“When we were in school we would stumble across all these ridiculous, unique, quirky things about Nashville that you can’t read about in the newspaper and we kind of felt like we were the only people who knew about them, or we would find out about things after they happened,” she said.

So, Frink, who just graduated, and Levy, who was in between jobs, set work on Nashvillest, posting information on everything from the recent ash spill in Kingston, Tenn., to the Snuggie pub crawl that took place in February.
In order to fuel the site, Frink and Levy sift through around 500 RSS feeds on a daily basis from various local media and make note of whatever stories are interesting.

“It’s a lot of skimming, a lot of scanning. It’s just constant information coming in,” Frink said.

It’s also a lot of time to give. Both have full time jobs these days, so posting content is a matter of staying up later, getting up earlier and shafting friends from time to time. Many of the actual posts are even automated to go live during the day. And blogging isn’t where it ends, either.

The Nashvillest has established a presence on social networking site, Twitter and currently boasts nearly 2,000 followers, so the conversation with readers and fellow bloggers goes beyond the daily posts.

As part of a larger picture, both Frink and Levy are also connected with Nashville’s tech community.

“I think a lot of the early adopters on Twitter in Nashville kind of found each other and so it was this social community to begin with and if you were on Twitter, you kind of knew these people,” Frink said.

Levy said that getting to know that community through social events like Tweet Ups, Geek Breakfasts and digital media mixers, helped to spread the word about Nashvillest.

Acceptance among peers is one thing, but as for the bigger, more traditional media outlets? Frink said that the response has been positive.

“We started out with no relationships with any of the media outlets, but since then, we’ve got friends at the Tennessean, Channel 5, Channel 2 – it’s a lot of people within the company… who just really embrace social media,” she explained.

Levy said there’s some hesitation, but generally it’s among those who are unfamiliar with what bloggers do.

“If if it’s a foreign concept, if they’re not bloggers, then there’s some hesitation from traditional media,” Levy said, “but as far as everyone that we’ve talked to, they are so supportive.”

All that said, it begs the question, where to now?

Already, Nashvillest has had to upgrade their hosting to accommodate the amount of site traffic they get.
Levy says that there are obvious natural limitations. The audience probably won’t grow too much beyond middle Tennessee, but as the growth they have seen, it has been steady.

In May, as the one-year anniversary approaches, Frink and Levy are planning a redesign, in part to make the site more conducive to advertising while not going overboard and inundating readers with ads.

“I want to make it a positive experience for advertisers and users,” Levy said.

Looking back over the past year, both Frink and Levy say that they have learned a lot. Frink noted that at one point the prospect of posting once a week seemed like it would be too much to handle.

“Little did I know …”