by Timothy Rutt
Dear Altadenablog Readers:
We’re always looking for ways to improve Altadenablog, but now we feel the need to take it to the next level. We need some help in some areas, and we want to keep our money local as much as we can, so we’re putting out a call into the community about some opportunities with us:
Feature writers: We’re kind of keeping on top of the hard news, but there’s one area where we’re falling behind: features. One of the things that makes Altadena unique is the amazing people and businesses who make this their home, and we would like to devote more space to them. One ”for instance” is that we want feature stories on some members of our sponsor team who haven’t been highlighted so far. They help keep Altadenablog going, and they deserve to have our readers know a little bit more about them. We also have a list about a yard long of stories we’d like to cover, but just don’t have time to do ourselves.
This is an ideal opportunity for someone who’s just starting out, or who hasn’t published anything for awhile and wants to get back in the game. We’re looking for freelance writers who understand the value of community journalism and about loving a place. We don’t pay that much yet (we’re working on it!) but we’re also trying not to ask too much out of the writer, either -- most of the stories can be handled in one or two phone calls, or a single visit.
You never know what will happen: one of our former freelancers pitched an article to an online magazine and submitted her Altadenablog stories as examples of recent work. She got the gig, which paid more than $1,000! Your mileage may vary.
Contact us (with some links to recent work, if you have them) at altadenblog (at) gmail.com.
Website consultant: We’ve been publishing on the Typepad platform for six years now. Six years ago, it was great. Today, not so much. There are some problems with our current publishing platfrom that keep it in the dark age of the Internet, and we don’t think that’s going to change.
One of the deficiencies is reading on mobile devices. Our goal is “Mobile First,” because we think most people will be getting their news mostly from phones and tablets, and our current format doesn’t allow that in a useful manner.
We are looking at moving the website into a WordPress format, which we think gives us much more versatility, is more attractive, and offers more to our sponsors. We don’t need somebody who can build a site from the ground up: we want someone who’s familiar with WordPress who can help us tweak an existing commerical format to our needs, but who is also available to troubleshoot if problems come up. We’ve been looking into this for awhile, and haven’t been happy with what we’ve seen thus far, but we know the talent is out there. And yes, we’ll pay professional rates for this. Email us at altadenablog @ gmail.com if you’re interested.
Meanwhile ... on to the next chapter!
