Backfence Grows Some More in Its Backyard

Backfence.com, the citizen-journalism venture of Mark Potts and Susan Defife which raised $3 million in venture-capital funding late last year, continues to stick close to home. It has added a Backfence site to Arlington, Virginia, the fourth hyper-local news Web site in the metro Washington, D.C., area.

Previously launched sites are McLean and Reston, Virginia (opened for business last May) and Bethesda, Maryland (launched in October). Eventually, Backfence sites will start showing up elsewhere around the U.S.

It’s interesting to observe Backfence’s relatively slow growth in relation to some of the blog networks (which seem to be sprouting like weeds since the success of Weblogs Inc. and Nick Denton‘s Gawker network). Some of the new blog networks debut with dozens of blogs on various topics right out of the gate. It’s a whole lot easier to launch a bunch of blogs — each a one-person operation — than to crank out a lot of more complicated citizen-media websites.