Hurdles, rewards for neighborhood blogs Big media companies trying to cash in on hyper-local news - information that's sometimes specific down to a couple of intersections in a big city - have not found the endeavor very profitable. [...] despite navigating the same economic concerns, myriad hyper-local blogs run by citizen journalists are thriving in San Francisco - though mostly as labors of love, where the bottom line is not the primary concern. On Thursday, EveryBlock, a network of neighborhood blogs owned by NBC, shut its doors. [...] many of them have a citizen journalist or three taking it upon themselves to capture the hyper-local news, events and general zeitgeist, without expecting it to be a paying proposition. A 34-year-old Harvard graduate, he earns his living as a freelance Web designer but spends anywhere from 15 minutes to most of a day, each day, writing, editing and managing the three blogs. "There aren't many people that are accessible, on the ground, have another source of income, have tech skills, can use WordPress, are comfortable with social media and, of course, are a good writer," he says. Blogs have low, almost nonexistent overhead costs. Besides the cost of a computer, hosting services run as low as $20 a month, and open-source publishing software like WordPress is pretty much free. Lappin says that within an hour, neighbors had sent him photos of damage inside the gallery, photos of emergency workers outside the gallery and first-person accounts of the events - all making for a pretty complete and informative post about the fire. Sarah Bacon, a Stanford-educated high-tech product manager by day, runs Richmond Blog and sees herself as a news outlet, delivering information rather than her opinions. A seemingly benign story about a mysterious sign on a vacant business space reading "Please Open a Taqueria" spun into a debate on the quality of the Richmond's Mexican food offerings.