The Late and Lamented Urban Dialect
Lives Once More, Only Now as a Blog

We've written before about a smart, sassy regional publication with a unique voice, Urban Dialect, which predictably went out of business a few years ago (predictable because its young, earnest and passionate crew of founders was sure that editorial excellence would eventually lead to sufficient advertising support. It doesn't, unless you pay extraordinary attention to sales, which they didn't. It's the oldest story in publishing, alas). Anyway, the founders (including my friend Clarence, whom I've written about here and here) were further embittered when the Cleveland Foundation's oh-so-safe-and-mainstream Civic Innovation Lab failed to provide funding, as anyone could have predicted. The other main co-founder, Daniel Gray Kontar, who worked for a time at Catalyst Cleveland, eventually headed for California to begin work on a doctorate, where he remains to this day.

Anyway, we're glad that it's finally just been revived on the web as a blog. We don't expect that the online-only version will ever quite reach the kind of critical mass of sustained excellence that once caused even the vaunted Columbia Journalism Review to take note of their efforts, as it did in 2003, but we'll take whatever we can get. Good luck on it, folks. We'll be watching with interest.