The Altadena Patch is scheduled to go live today. We welcome local editor Dan Abendschein, a fine journalist and former Pasadena Star-News reporter, to our town to lend a fresh perspective on things Altadena.
Patch is a subsidiary of New York-based AOL, which is launching about 500 plug-and-play local sites this year -- each one looking like the other, yet each one promising to reflect its unique community.
What do we like about it? For one thing, each site promises to have a directory of local businesses, a valuable service to have available online (and so tedious to compile that we wouldn't want to do it ourselves!) For another, it gives talented people a chance to work -- AOL is hiring more journalists than anyone else right now. We have friends who have already had pieces appear in the local versions of Patch, and we want them to be paid and want their work to be widely read. That's a win.
What don't we like? To pay for this, AOL has targeted small local businesses as a source of revenue, and has deployed an ad sales staff in each community to feed the AOL maw. Personally, we don't think that Altadena businesses shipping their advertising dollars to New York helps our struggling local economy -- one of the reasons why we turned down Patch's offer to run the local site.
There are other reasons: unlike Patch, we answer solely to you, our readers, and not to a regional editor or a corporate suit. As a locally-owned community website, we most highly value the relationship we have with our readers, who are also our neighbors, and who are now so much more than ever our eyes in the field. Ultimately, we have a different philosophy than Patch about what a local news site should be like and what constitutes "local," and that is reflected in how we do what we do.
That said -- imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. We started this website in part because, after living here for several years, we found Altadena was continually neglected or short-shrifted in local news coverage and there was no central place to find out what was happening in government, the library, the arts, or the churches and other community organizations. There were also wonderful people here who needed to be lifted up, stories that needed to be told, and dark places that needed light. That's why we started this website, and why we've been going strong for three years -- and if someone outside finally takes notice of this unique place we call home, then we've succeeded in our efforts.
