This isn’t really a component of my Winter Survial Strategy, per se. More of a recognition. But it does help me survive and thrive here in Minneapolis.

When I first moved here 3.5 years ago I looked around for some blogs and other local media to help me familiarize myself with my new home. I found a few things but for the most part stuck to the obvious: City Pages, the sadly out-of-print Rake, a few Northeast websites, and Diablo Cody’s blog (back before she blew up).

Now, some years later, I have decided that either I wasn’t looking in the right places or there’s been a Twin Cities media renaissance, because every day my Google Reader is overflowing with new posts from about a dozen blogs, magazines, and independent news sites. The Star-Tribune, like every other major newspaper in the country, may be facing drastic cutbacks and ill-advised redesigns, but you’d never guess there was a media crisis from looking at some of these local sites.

I finished school in May, and while most of my class relocated—either back to the cities they came from or on to new places—I chose to stay in Minneapolis, for a variety of reasons. I have never once regretted that decision, though every now and then I find myself in the curious position of having to defend it, as if I must be insane to voluntarily live in a city so cold / hot / small / big / Midwestern / Scandanavian etc.

I can never fully understand this line of inquiry or sympathize with my interlocutor—if I could, I probably wouldn’t be here and wouldn’t be having that conversation, though I suspect some variation of it occurs at some point between residents of nearly any locale—though I certainly understand that Minneapolis is not for everyone. It does get brutally cold; it’s true. It might not have all the amenities some people desire, and it has its share of political, infrastructural, and cultural problems, just like any city.

But I’ve personally never been so consistently impressed with the place where I live, and have no qualms about proclaiming this city my favorite of all the places I’ve lived in my life. So yeah, I guess I’m a bit of a cheerleader for the Twin Cities. And the blogs I follow either bolster my evangelism by highlighting what’s good about this place, or keep me grounded by reporting on what’s wrong with it.

A little over a year ago, City Pages named Mediation best local blog. It took me a while to see why—after all, it’s just a dude with a Tumblr—but there’s a lot that a dude with a Tumblr can do. It’s mostly a links dump, as Tumblrs tend to be, but it’s the ne plus ultra of links dumps, with links to news, awesome photos, and surprisingly insightful commentary. It’s also a good barometer of emerging internet memes I somehow haven’t heard of yet.

In much the same way that I seem to discover another local band every week, it seems like every week I’m discovering another cool local blog—aggregators like Tumble Like You Give A Damn and Eyeteeth; arts & culture blogs like Reveille, Minnesota Reads, and Culture Bully; and citizen-journalism sites like the Uptake, MN Independent, and Twin Cities Indymedia.

These sites quickly and efficiently reveal just how much is going on in the Twin Cities at any given moment. From these blogs and from firsthand experience I know that a new gallery opens in Northeast Minneapolis every 6.5 minutes, and that a new local post-neo-dance-folk-punk supergroup is coalescing on the stage of the Triple Rock once every half hour. I know an event—whether it’s a salon, concert, bike ride, or icebound arts festival is going to be big when I see ten different local sites covering it all at once.

Granted, some of these sites are maintained by veterans of the local media scene, but some of them are run by regular dudes, or some combination thereof. And it’s not just because I know some of the people involved and write for a couple of them that it feels like a small, close-knit community in the best possible way. I’ve come to realize that media markets in most cities, even the really big ones, are small, incestuous communities. That’s not always a good thing, of course, but more often than not it leaves me feeling well-connected and plugged into what’s going on in my own backyard.

It’s sad that so many people live in a place without ever learning anything significant about it—I know I used to. Over the past few years, with the help of the three thousand daily new items in the “MPLS” folder of my Google Reader, I’ve felt an increasingly palpable sensation I can only vaguely describe as something approaching civic pride. I don’t care how cold it is out there right now.

“Yes, eat all of our shirts.”