Randy Neal owns and operates KnoxViews, a community politics blog, and invites users to use the site as a forum for community concerns.

Q: Do you have a background in journalism?
A: No. I have always been interested in writing and briefly entertained the idea of majoring in journalism (this was during the Watergate era when Woodward and Bernstein were pop culture heroes) but I put college on hold and went to work and ended up in the information technology field.

Q: What inspired you to start KnoxViews, and what are your goals for the site?
A: We moved to Florida in the early 80s, and when we moved back to East Tennessee in 2000 there was a bit of reverse culture shock. I got involved in some local online forums discussing local politics and culture and the back and forth was interesting and kind of fun.

Then I read an article in Newsweek about this UT law professor (Glenn Reynolds, aka InstaPundit) who had this thing called a "blog" and I thought, hey, anybody can do that. So I started a blog under an pseudonym that had become a sort of "character" on some of the local online forums.

That ended for a variety of reasons that are too complicated to go in to, and after a few months of withdrawal I read about something called "hyperlocal community blogging." This was interesting to me from the standpoint of civic involvement, so we (my wife and I) launched KnoxViews.com in January of 2006 with the idea of providing an outlet for an alternative and more liberal/progressive point of view that we did not feel was being represented in the local traditional media.

The original idea was to provide a mostly open platform to promote "citizen journalism" and prompt public conversations about public affairs from a local progressive point of view.
-Randy Neal, KnoxViews

We feel that community-driven conversations on a wide range of community and local government issues have informed public opinion from an alternative point of view that is not always covered in the traditional media. While it's hard to say whether it is effective in terms of influencing public policy for the better, there is no doubt that influential people are reading. We have also tried to help promote local non-profits by publicizing causes and events, and this appears to be somewhat effective at times.

So basically, after three years KnoxViews.com is still an ongoing experiment and we're not quite sure where it's headed. We have tried different things, some that worked and some that didn't, and we will be trying other things going forward. Our goal is to establish KnoxViews.com as a serious and respected alternative "new media" website that promotes civil discussion and public engagement while keeping it interesting and entertaining.