Rockville View Shutters Site
A Rockville man died on a bicycle, and it turned out that Cynthia Cotte Griffiths had two Facebook friends in common with him. She reached out to them saying she wanted to write a tribute about the man for her website, Rockville View.
The 2-year-old site, she said, was able to be “that community place.” A site where people could describe how much someone meant to people and how much they were going to miss him, she said.
On Monday, Rockville View closed, a victim of the rising cost of libel insurance.
While she was wrestling with the libel insurance paperwork, Griffiths was offered a job at Interfaith Works, a nonprofit that serves the poor and homeless in Montgomery County. She starts her new position as development and communications director at the nonprofit Tuesday.
A message on the site’s homepage reads:
Rockville View was a local community news site covering Rockville, Maryland from August 2015 to August 2017. Published by Online and In Person Inc., the site was dedicated to providing sourced and transparent articles detailing the news, along with a weekly comprehensive event listing and crime report. Coverage accentuated the best of what was happening in Rockville.
Thank you to all of the subscribers that saw the benefit of a local news site and supported the effort financially. Each and every one of Rockville View‘s paid subscribers is to be commended for staying informed and making Rockville a better place.
Cynthia Cotte Griffiths, President of Online and In Person LLC
Although she’s looking forward to her new job, Griffiths said she felt bittersweet for giving up the site.
“It’s hard to walk away from it, but I’m going to tomorrow,” she said.
Griffiths said she knew it would take five years to grow a local site and she said she was prepared for that.
“I liked when I covered things that no one else covered, and it was the only way people could find out about it,” she said.
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