Authentically Local

"I can remember a time when I could almost pinpoint a man’s place of origin by his speech. That is..."

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 11:51:38 -0400

“I can remember a time when I could almost pinpoint a man’s place of origin by his speech. That is growing more difficult now and will in some foreseeable future become impossible… The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of the poetry of place and time must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless. Localness is not gone but it is going.”

- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, 1961

How Hyperlocal? Eat Your Sidewalk!

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 01:23:54 -0400

The crew behind a campaign called Eat Your Sidewalk has brought an entirely new meaning to the word local. Forget the vast Agricultural Industrial Complex. Eat Your Sidewalk is about finding breakfast, lunch, dinner in your own front yard. Literally. The project, which failed to reach its $23,000 Kickstarter goal, is nonetheless in the midst of a seven-day challenge to get at least some of the people in Sherbrooke Quebec to subsist for an entire week on what they can find right under their feet.

Watch the Kickstarter video to get a full sense of the Eat Your Sidewalk philosophy, but here’s a snippet.

When you begin to eat what’s under your feet, you and your environment share the same history and the same future. When we eat this dandelion, we share what’s happened to it.

And I liked this.

So often we talk about local but we skip over our actual place to get to the parts of our environment we more easily recognize because they are more like products or have been defined for us as important. But this means we are not addressing our actual environment fully. How do we do this? Begin with where you are — your sidewalks, yards, neighborhoods, and the systems that they are part of — and pay attention to everything. When this really happens a place comes alive.

The blog is pretty charming too.

Our bartering was limited. Cole bartered removing some poison ivy for a bottle of wine. We were quite content with this. Needing little else.

Not sure how much sustenance I’d get from my little, ahem, patch, but thanks to a story I heard on WNYC the other day, I was able to identify a burdock plant growing on my lawn.

— Debbie Galant

Most places claim to be authentic and original. Austin, Texas...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:35:00 -0400

Most places claim to be authentic and original. Austin, Texas really is. From its famous bat bridge to its Segway tours to its food-courts-on-wheels to the wonderful Drafthouse cinemas, Austin lives up to its slogan, “Keep Austin Weird.” There is a store on South Congress called Uncommon Objects, which features salvaged antiques, bric-a-brac and high-caliber kitsch. In all of New York City and Brooklyn, I have never seen a store to match this one. Kudos, Austin, for keeping it real, and keeping it real interesting.

— Debbie Galant

On September 30, 2011, during the Block by Block conference at...

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 01:18:07 -0400

On September 30, 2011, during the Block by Block conference at Loyola University Chicago, 21 local, independent online publishers from across the United States voted to form a tradeassociation.
A steering committee was appointed to further organize the association.
Questions should be directed to Executive Secretary, Mike Fourcher at (773) 328-8451 or mike@brownlinemedia.com

Schadenfreude, Part Two: I Apologize

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 18:38:13 -0400

Schadenfreude, or gloating over another’s misfortune, is not a pretty thing. By definition.

And though I’m used to being scolded by readers, my upbraiding by some of the Patch rank-and-file over my last post here has left me unexpectedly chastened.

I meant my rant for AOL’s corporate overlords, for Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington in particular, but I managed to offend and hurt other local journalists who, just like me, spent the last week bailing basements and working furiously to keep up with the news.

That’s bad, and that’s not pretty, and I apologize.

We live in a time of great economic disruption and everything in the world of media — everything in the world — is up for grabs. My local newspaper got sore when a new kid came to town (that would be me) and I didn’t like it any better when Patch moved in.

The two Patch editors whose work I know best — Shelley Emling and Mary Mann — do excellent work. I’d hire either of them in a minute if I could afford them.

There is a war in the world of local, as the existence of publication StreetFight attests to, and I’m a bit player in that war. I enjoyed seeing my adversary stumble. I gloated. And the one who looked bad in the end wasn’t my enemy; it was me.

I have a lot to learn from the indie bookstores and small town retailers who have been fighting this fight for years. There are classier ways to fight wars, and I vow to learn them.

Debbie Galant, Baristanet

Schadenfreude Time: Watching AOL Circling the Drain

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 14:48:00 -0400

Those of us who are the proprietors of small, independent hyperlocal news blogs have been watching the headlines with glee.

Tim Armstrong’s AoL dream may be ending

What Happens When AOL Finally Decides to Go Private

What an AOL Garage Sale Would Look Like

AOL Needs to Break Up Now

“Patch is worthless,” wrote Dana Blackenhorn in Seeking Alpha. ”Close it. Think a company like Gannett (GCI) or The New York Times (NYT) or News Corp. (NWS) might want it? If you find a sucker like that, call me. I have a bridge to sell.” Music to our ears.

It may be too early to dance on Patch’s grave, but boy are we ready. We all know how expensive and hard it is to do hyperlocal — but, unlike Patch, we haven’t had $160 million pockets to dig into. We’ve had to do it with our own sweat. I don’t know what the hollow-cheeked Tim Armstrong was doing when Hurricane Irene hit the New York area in the wee hours of Sunday morning, but I can tell you what I was doing: getting the news out to my readers, without the benefit or electricity or cable. And when my iPhone hotspot no longer worked, my partner Liz George took over. Being late August, with multiple vacations going on, I ran the post-hurricane ship solo for several days. I didn’t have time to clear the slop out of my dead refrigerator until Wednesday night.

Of course those deep pockets were filled with money owned by investors, and they’re the ones have a revolt now. What Armstrong treated like free money actually wasn’t. If Patch is worthless, it’s because Tim Armstrong thought he could do local by applying massive scale. Local is local. By definition, It’s what’s close. It’s not about scale. Heed this, StreetFight. Local is what’s right around you. Neighbors are people you recognize. Grassroots grow from the bottom up, not the top down.

Hyperlocal isn’t worthless. Small-town newspapers have been functioning for years; people have always been interested in the news in their neighborhoods. What media like Baristanet and West Seattle Blog have done is chase small-town newspapers into the 21st century. We’ve taken the tools of new media and social media, and with nimbleness and creativity, shown how local news can be turned into a 24-hour-a-day conversation, complete with crowdsourcing and commentary. Local newspapers have smartened up. We showed them how.

If AOL bites the dust, and more importantly for us, if Patch does, it will be buried in the media graveyard somewhere near Back Fence.

We’re ready to send flowers.

Debbie Galant, Baristanet

Talking to The Sopranos Location Scout about What's Authentically Jersey

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 11:06:00 -0400

Mark Kamine was the original location director of The Sopranos and, since the show ended, he’s moved on to become a production director of movies like “The Fighter” and “Limitless.” A 16-year-resident of Montclair, Kamine himself departs for a new location today, when moving vans come to move him and his family to New York City. We sat down to talk to Kamine about the iconic locations of the Sopranos and about the concept of place in general. This story originally appeared on Baristanet.

How did you come to the Sopranos job and how long did you do it?

I was a location manager and I started as a scout. I was working for about eight or 10 years at that before Sopranos started. I knew the producer from other jobs.

Who was that?

Ilene Landress. She called me when they were doing the pilot. I was on another job. And then when the show got picked up, I started. Which was maybe a year after. And I remember I met David Chase as part of the process in a hotel in New York. It was sort of unheard of at the time for a cable network to be doing a TV series. It was very early in the process — ‘97, ‘98 — and the test for the show was that it might appeal to housewives and professors, academics. Which didn’t sound too promising. But we had some scripts and we started to scout for some of the things that the pilot had shot, but to do in a more permanent way, like the pork store. They started to build the Soprano house in North Caldwell. That started to get reproduced on the stage. And it was just a general figuring out how to continue the look of the pilot.

It seems to me that show was so much about location.

David Chase grew up in New Jersey, I think he was born in Newark, and then Verona and the Caldwell area after that. He often had specific ideas about where to find things. And then I also grew up in New Jersey. Born in Jersey City, grew up in Wayne. And spent a lot of time all over the place and then lived in Montclair for a long time. The whole time I was doing that show. And then my main assistant, Regina Heyman, who took over the location managing for me after three years, she grew up in Montclair. She had a lot of New Jersey knowledge too. And then the scouts who worked with us. They’re New York scouts they tend to spend time all over the New York area. And certainly over the course of Sopranos, when we would read a script, everyone had ideas of where to find it, what town. That sounds like Little Falls. Or that sounds like North Caldwell. You started to get the rhythm of how to find certain things.

What makes a Jersey location different from others?

New Jersey, residentially, was formed later than the older suburbs in Westchester and Connecticut. The general feel of Westchester, like one of the river towns or Chappaqua: they’re older houses and I hate to say they’re classier, but there’s more of an upscale tradition to it. And New Jersey, not that it doesn’t exist, those kinds of places in New Jersey, but a lot of the residential developments came out of the late 50’s and 60’s and there’s definitely a feel of that in Sopranos. There were the old blue collar towns, like Kearney and parts of Newark. And then there’s the suburban sprawl that was a big part of it. The Soprano neighborhood, they’re new houses. They’re newish over-the-top, big houses on decent property but not sprawling property. Like you’re not in Pound Ridge or something. It’s New Jersey. It’s just different. It’s a little hilly but it’s not real hilly for most part, unlike maybe Westchester. It doesn’t have a rural feel like Connecticut and Long Island is pretty flat. There’s a Jersey landscape that’s pretty noticeable. And then there’s the industrial side or the manufacturing and light industrial side of New Jersey, which is very distinct. Everyone knows the Turnpike drive and the flaming smokestacks. There’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of river warehouses. That was a big part of Sopranos. The Meadowlands look.

Then there’s the whole ethnic thing. And the journey of the generations from town to town.

I know that when we started to get into the flashbacks from season one, David said we should be shooting Junior’s old neighborhood in Down Neck, which is Newark. But it’s not even called Down Neck anymore, really. It’s Ironbound. It’s Portugese, instead of Italian. But in any case, there was definitely a sense of progression from those sort of neighborhoods of wooden row houses where Junior supposedly lived — which was Watsessing Ave, I think, because David liked that name more than anything – to North Caldwell where Tony ends up. We shot a lot of scenes in Kearney, Harrison, Belleville. For those slightly older but not-quite-in-the-city towns. And then there’s the North Caldwell version, which is the newer generation of build-your-own house or buy a new house, state of the art, with the swimming pool and all that. And a lot of marble in the interior.

What were some of your favorite locations?

I liked the pork store. That was good one. The original pork store for the pilot was in Elizabeth and that was a working pork store and we had to find one where we could film constantly. And also that was maybe a little closer to New York, just for transportation reasons. That was a good find. It was at the bottom of a hill. It was in a town that had a great Main Street, in Kearney. It was a useful location. It was near Newark. It was not so far from the city. And it had a great look, I think. When we took it over, it had been an auto parts store and it was getting converted into like a cleaning company’s office and we kind of made a deal with the person who owned that company to have him relocate his office. David when he saw it, he liked it a lot. And I think it was that year it became the big image in the New York Times Arts and Leisure article about the Sopranos.

Were you involved in the last scene at Holstens?

No. By then I was production managing. That was Gina Heyman. She might have even thought of it. She grew up in Montclair. That place was in Bloomfield and if you’re looking for a coffee shop to set the last scene, it was a natural, if you’re from this area. There are a few old, really good-looking diners. And diners were always a big part. And certainly that’s another, not just New Jersey thing, but it’s a big part of the Jersey scene — all the diners. And we shot a lot of diners over the course of the Sopranos.

Were you aware of the whole controversy?

Yeah, I was aware of it. I was still working on the show. And that was a pretty constant problem with Sopranos once it became well known . There were the Italian-American groups who would say it’s defamatory. And of course David Chase got a kick out of that, because one of the original anti-defamatory Italian societies was founded by Colombo, or one of those guys. It was actually a smokescreen for this guy, who was a mobster. We had issues with various towns, Bloomfield at the end. I don’t know all the details about that. Certainly, Nutley we had some issues with. There were some people in the government, not the mayor or the council, but we wanted to film in the park there and someone didn’t want us to. And I think a professor at William Paterson University — we wanted to film a scene there — and this woman who was concerned about the image of Italian Americans kind of prevented us from filming it there. We had a script for Columbia University. Meadow went to Columbia. And we had a script where her bicycle got stolen and Columbia didn’t let us film there at the school because that was in the script. That was funny to me, because at the same time they were telling us we couldn’t film there because we showed a bicycle getting stolen in New York City, they were very proudly advocating for academic freedom of speech.

What role did Montclair have? What did Montclair represent?

It was where Dr. Melfi’s office was. I don’t know that it was ever exactly spelled out. That was certainly David’s sense. I think he specificially said there’s a street you should look at for the back door of Melfi’s office. Early on, when Tony’s coming out of Melfi’s office, they try to kill him. There’s a hit, which I think Junior was involved in. And Montclair was like a little bit more educated. It makes sense for Melfi, she would be in Montclair. That’s where you would go for therapy – not Kearney or North Caldwell. Clearly, in the world of Sopranos you’re not going to go to therapy in a blue-collar town and you’re not going to go in the brand new suburb. You might know people. And there’s a stigma about therapy for Tony Soprano. He had to keep it secret and none of his buddies or associates are going to be there.

Where was Artie’s restaurant?

Where it was really located, originally, I think was Long Island City. It was the interior of a restaurant there. And that was because the stage was always in Long Island City at Silver Cup and so we would very rarely – because David wouldn’t let us – cheat locations close to the stage. He really wanted to go to New Jersey whenever possible. I guess to his credit. You can’t argue with success. But the restaurant itself, the interior was in Long Island City. We ended up building it on the stage. And the exterior. We shot a few different exteriors. I think we shot in Caldwell. We shot a parking lot in Lyndhurst once or twice. It was a little bit indeterminate. The idea was it was somewhere out in the Caldwells or near enough to where Tony and Carmella lived. It was suburban.

What do you see happening to locations, just in terms of big box stores and suburbanization? Do you see uniqueness of location going away?

Well certainly locations go away. There’s the big box store and the sort of endless highways of chain stores. They are locations. And they have a certain usefulness or beauty I guess in movies or TV. But locations go away. It’s harder and harder to find proper locations – just because of the nature of things. Awnings change. And ATMs spring up everywhere. And next thing you know you have a really hard time convincing anyone that it’s 1974 or 1895 or whatever your problem is.

Do you see the world becoming more homogenized? Or do you think the variety will always be there?

It’s certainly becoming more homogenized, but I don’t see in the near future it becoming a problem finding locations. Just because places like Newark or Kearney or Bayonne, they’re older towns. Partly economically because they can’t afford to upgrade, so they’re stuff gets preserved. I didn’t do the movie, but I think when they shot “Age of Innocence,” they went up to Troy or the Albany area to find turn-of- the-last-century looking stuff. It’s just like, if it’s a little bit economically depressed, things don’t change. They just fall apart.

How long did you live in Montclair?

This is 16 ½ years in Montclair. We had lived in New York City for a long time when I was first starting to do locations and my wife worked there. And then we had a kid. We moved out when he was about four. And now he’s in college and we’re going back to the city.

And how do you feel about that?

Great. It’s exciting. You know, it’s a little bit bittersweet to be leaving here. It was a great town to raise a kid in and live in. Really great movie theaters and lot of restaurants and great people. So it’s bittersweet.

Satriale’s photo from Wikipedia.

—Debbie Galant, Baristanet

God bless Watchung Booksellers, my local indie bookstore. My...

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:03:18 -0400

God bless Watchung Booksellers, my local indie bookstore. My third novel, “Cars from a Marriage” just came out in paperback today. But according to Amazon, there is only one copy left in stock. Watchung, which knows me as the editor of Baristanet as well as a locally-bestselling novelist, has 10 copies, prominently displayed on its summer reading table. And the bookstore owner is going to add a note telling local book groups that I’m happy to come talk to them if they read my book.

Now that’s service. And context. Another reason why relationships matter.

— Debbie Galant, Baristanet

Authentically Locavore

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:30:11 -0400

Authentically Locavore:

Let’s hoist a glass to Frank Bruni of The New York Times for his 3,200-word paean to the authentically local food scene of Seattle in Sunday’s Travel section. Best quote: “To eat in and around Seattle, which I did recently and recommend heartily, isn’t merely to eat well. It is to experience something that even many larger, more gastronomically celebrated cities and regions can’t offer, not to this degree: a profound and exhilarating sense of place.”

But I also liked, “You want a closer relationship with what you eat? At the Willows Inn You can practically bed down with it.”

Take that, Red Lobster.

— Debbie Galant, Baristanet

Authentically Local, a set by johnleesandiego on Flickr. One of...

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 13:13:00 -0400

Authentically Local, a set by johnleesandiego on Flickr.

One of Baristanet’s favorite readers, John Lee, felt so connected to the Authentically Local campaign that he assembled an “Authentically Local” Flickr set and an Authentically Local Flickr group. Please contribute to the group. Pictures of the places we love tell the story of why local is important.

John has promised me a short essay on why Authentically Local speaks to him, and I will publish it when he writes it. Meanwhile, if a picture is worth a thousand words, this set is worth 50,000. Good thing I’m not paying him by the word!

— Debbie Galant, Baristanet

Patch Dispatch

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:02:00 -0400

Today they are standing on every corner in one town outside New York City. They are blonde, female and clearly under 25. They wear bright green T-shirts and visors that say “Patch,” and they hand out pens and stickers and leaflets by the gross. They do not live here.

“Have you read Patch?” they croon to the commuters and shoppers and mommies with strollers, many of whom stare straight ahead without stopping.

These are the New Journalists. At least they say they are.

The sites are parachuting down so fast they can’t even keep up with the list of “coming” sites on the Patch homepage; the town where we spotted the lovelies today isn’t even on the list yet, but they are advertising for writers on Craigslist.

In Southern Westchester New York, as well as in other affluent suburban areas in eight other states, Patch has let loose (what they say are) 75 young reporters, bloggers, marketers and sales people to cover an area that we do with two to four, depending on the day.

Editors of hyperlocal sites like mine, like Baristanet in New Jersey, OaklandLocal, WestSeattleBlog and dozens of others that were built on the passions of their founders, consider Poach, I mean Patch, to be anything from a pesky annoyance to a real threat.

My standard response when people ask me how we differ, is that Patch is like a drive-thru McDonald’s, all corporate and chain-like, and we are a comfy diner. That serves cocktails.

I think we must all be mindful that conglomo-sites like Patch, while legitimate local news gathering enterprises, could push bootstrap start-ups off the map, simply because they’re able to spend millions. It feels too much like what Gannett was able to do with dozens upon dozens of local newspapers almost a generation ago.

Patch is hardly the only one out there. I was approached by the Publisher of MainStreetConnect, who told me he has bought up 3000 urls, including www.thedailynorwalk.com in Connecticut. He offered me a job editing all the sites in Westchester County (which has about 72 towns and villages) for $40,000 a year.

“We are going to put you out of business anyway,” he said.

I declined. “We’ll be watching you carefully,” he added.

It’s capitalism. We are okay with that. Media is reinventing. We are okay with that too. These are great training grounds for young journalists. Even better. I’m jus’ sayin’ let’s all keep an eye out for each other and not lose sight of why we do this to begin with: to tell stories, inform, protect, advocate and provide a platform for all voices. The voices with the best economy of scale shouldn’t automatically win.

One of the most important things I learned at the Knight Digital Media Center is the importance of the role of the publisher as community builder. Because online journalism is often a conversation between media and readers, rather than the Voice of God of yore, one of the most important things we can do is to help build partnerships and alliances when both sides are committed to the same community.

Two summers ago, we at theLoop had the idea to sponsor a Bastille Day block party in our area with a local restaurant to give residents a reason to visit the village at night. We offered publicity and coverage. We paid the police overtime and the band with modest sponsorship money, and the sponsors put up their banners. More than 500 people came. There was music, food and drinks. It was great for the partner restaurant, for the sponsoring businesses and it was great for theLoop.

Last year, Patch approached our partner and offered $900 and ten staffers (in T-shirts and visors and pens, flyers…) to sponsor our event. The restaurant agreed. Most of the staffers were dispatched from Patch HQ in Soho, New York City, and don’t live here. There was little we could do. We set up a table and tried to look cheerful.

But I may order some T-shirts.

—Polly Kreisman, TheLoop

Even though they are pretty much the same from town to town,...

Tue, 31 May 2011 10:31:00 -0400

Even though they are pretty much the same from town to town, there is nothing more authentically local than a small-town Memorial Day parade.

Photo by S.J.Streeter for Baristanet.

What About the Local Cinema Chain?

Tue, 24 May 2011 13:13:00 -0400

Clearview Cinemas, a New Jersey-based chain of movie theaters with outposts in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, is owned by Cablevision, a giant corporation with plenty of enemies — which makes it hard to argue that it is an “authentically local.” Still, when we at Baristanet started our Favorite Places feature, we led off with the Clairidge, a Clearview theater based in Montclair, because it is one of my favorite places on earth. Clearview categorizes nine of its theaters as art houses, and the Clairidge is one. It’s where I saw Like Water for Chocolate, Remains of the Day, Eat Drink Man Woman, Life is Beautiful, Shakespeare in Love, American Beauty and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — to name just a few.

Montclair used to have three art house theaters. We’re down to just one, and if the Clairidge ever shuttered, it would be a huge loss.

This past weekend, I went to another Clearview movie theater, Clearview’s Caldwell Cinema 4, to see a mainstream movie, “Bridesmaids,” which happens to be a hoot. Right after the trailers, before the movie started, an employee of the theater stood up in front of the audience, introduced himself and welcomed everyone to the show. I’d seen this once before too at the Clairidge. I think it’s both simple and classy.

Both the Clairidge and the Caldwell theater sit on Bloomfield Ave., their old-fashioned marquees facing the street. You either park on the street or in municipal parking lots that you reach via alley. I know people who prefer to go to AMC’s because the screens are bigger and the sound is better. But to me, going to a storefront movie theater is the quintessential small-town experience. There aren’t that many left, and like the Clearview ones, they’re probably all owned by corporations now. I’ll say this for Cablevision: they paid money to a local entrepreneur and kept the experience pretty much the same for the customer.

So are the Clairidge and the Caldwell Cinema 4 authentically local? I’d like the term to be completely unambiguous, to refer only to locally-owned establishments. But in this case, I think the big corporation maintained an authentically-local experience and saved the local landscape. Reasonable people may disagree. But certainly it’s a better result than what befell the Franklin Theater in Nutley.

— Debbie Galant, Baristanet

Justin Bieber Doesn't Live Here

Mon, 23 May 2011 19:06:00 -0400

A few months back, AOL dropped a 58-page handbook on its Patch editors entitled “The AOL Way”. After some introductory remarks on how the operations of its local sites should be organized—bolstered by more arrows and flags than an NFL playbook—the document got down to brass tacks. “The AOL Way” laid out exactly what each site—or “town” in AOL local news parlance—needed to do to goose pageviews and bring in more revenues. Which was, of course, exactly the opposite of what you really would need to do to grow the business if you were an authentically local site.

Look folks, it’s pretty easy to gin up traffic to a Web site. Get a list of the keywords du jour, and write to them. Hundreds of spam farms all around the globe do that every day. There are alphabetized list of of top tags so if I wanted to, I could write a sentence like “While blogging with Justin Bieber about Bin Laden, I watched the royal wedding on my Apple iPad and the horror that is Donald Trump in election 2012”.

As I read it, the “AOL Way” would have editors generate keyword-driven content. They are supposed to start their day identifying “high-demand topics” and assign topics on them.

Trouble is, Justin Bieber doesn’t live in my town, nor, thankfully, does Donald Trump.

As an authentically local site, I need to write about my own, local celebrities and there’s no shortage of them. A well-known stunt man lives in Verona and we count a major movie script writer among our expats. One of the stars of “Jerseylicious” runs a business in Verona, and we have three nationally recognized chefs: Floyd Cardoz, Ariane Duarte and Carmen Quagliata. We’ve had an Olympic gold medal winner (Tokyo, 1964), whose achievements inspired Verona to build an Olympic-sized community pool that we enjoy to this day.

We also have plenty of celebrities who aren’t in the national spotlight, and may never be: The kids who win academic competitions and break wrestling records, the stars of the middle school play, the businesswoman who almost single-handedly built the town’s central business district.

This doesn’t mean that MyVeronaNJ.com ignores global events. When Bin Laden was killed, we took a moment to remember the three Verona lives lost on 9/11. Since “Three Cups of Tea” is on the assigned reading list at our middle school, we wrote about the recent assertions that the book is more fiction than non-fiction. One of our high school writers (we have both high school and middle school kids writing for us), penned a story last year about what “Toy Story” meant to his generation.

When an authentically local site writes about what’s closest to the hearts of its local audience, it gets the clicks. Lots of clicks. More clicks than if its writers followed some corporate handbook.

—Virginia Citrano, MyVeronaNJ

Four Questions to Ask When Patch Moves Into Your Town

Tue, 17 May 2011 13:52:00 -0400

AOL’s Patch.com, with editor in chief Arianna Huffington, is on the aggressive move: it’s right now in about 800 communities, with a goal of 1,000 by the end of 2011. Huffington wants to make the Patches a keystone in coverage of the 2012 election, and AOL is investing heavily in them, so they’ll want a significant return. Patch isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

But I don’t think Patch is the best model for local news coverage. In the interests of transparency: I’ve been editor and publisher of Altadenablog in Altadena, California since October 2007. In 2010, AOL contacted me to see if I wanted to run the Altadena Patch. I turned them down, and Altadena Patch went online in October 2010 with another local editor.

One of the reasons I turned them down is that I had a different vision of a locally-owned and focused website — we don’t even accept national advertisers. Now that we’ve been operating side-by-side for several months — and the Altadena Patch is one of the better ones — I’m more convinced than ever that local news needs to have local ownership — the cliche is “it needs to have skin in the game.” The metaphor I use is the ham and eggs breakfast: the commitment of the chicken is different than the commitment of the pig. As a resident of Altadena and someone who runs his business here — I’m the pig!

Here are four questions to ask when Patch moves into your town:

1. Remember that AOL is in this to make money. Nothing wrong with that — so are we. However, AOL has identified small local business as a revenue source for the large corporation. AOL is in your town to have local businesses buy ads so the local Patch can ship bucketloads of money to New York City to feed AOL executives, shareholders, and now Arianna Huffington. On the other hand, with a locally-owned news website, the money paid by advertisers gets spent in town.

Question: is removing money from your community in the best interests of your community? 

2. If I go to a Burger King in Pasadena, West Covina, Texas, or Maine, I know exactly what I’m going to get. The chain sells a uniform, predictable experience. But if I want to show a visitor my town, we don’t go to Burger King — we go into the local coffee shop or restaurant, the one that’s not part of a national chain.  Like any franchise, in order for AOL to make money, they’ve got to operate on economies of scale — so each Patch more or less looks and operates like every other, running on the assumption that every community has exactly the same needs and interests. For example, AOL says that moms drive most spending in a household, so they have a lot of mom-pandering articles and contests — and most of the Patches we’ve looked at push Mom-grabbing ideas like “Mom of the Year.”   

But what works for a chain restaurant doesn’t work for local news. Your community is unique in its history, issues, interests, and the people who live there — Patch makes the assumption that Altadena is like Newport Beach is like Rochester NY is like Great Neck NJ and can fit in the same box.

Question: Can a website that looks and acts like a thousand others properly serve your unique community?

3. Question: Do you want the voice of your community to be the one AOL gives you?  

4. As a related question: the Huffington Post has always tended toward a particularly political point of view. It’s the brand that Arianna Huffington has set up. Arianna has been very good at promoting and protecting her own personal brand. Now that Patch is a branch of the Huffington Post, will it follow the HuffPo direction? If uniformity of look and coverage is very important to the Patch model of news, what does that mean to coverage and opinion on local issues? And what kind of outlet devoted to local news publishes an editorial by Arianna Huffington?

Question: is it a good thing for 1,000 different communities to have their news and opinion coming from (and controlled by) the same source?

My answer to all of these questions is “No,” which has only become firmer with time. LIke our community, we are unique and strive to reflect our community’s uniqueness. The news we cover, the issues we choose to handle — even things like our type font — have all been improved by reader input, which we reflect on our website. Patch — or any other fauxcal site with an out-of-town central command — can’t say that.

— Tim Rutt, Altadenablog

Remembering Fernwood...

Fri, 13 May 2011 23:57:00 -0400

Place has always been important to me. In 1998 I wrote a column for The New York Times about a swim club called Fernwood, which held a special place in my heart. Of all the columns I wrote in my five years at the Jersey column, this is the one people mentioned most. It’s easy to take favorite places for granted. But when they’re gone, it’s like a death…

Here are the first few graphs.

NEW JERSEY; Less Than a Country Club, but Much More

By DEBRA GALANT

EVERYTHING has its season and now that the children are tucked away in school, we have finally re-entered the Season of Productivity.

Although I spent half of August yearning for this, I now see that I should have been enjoying every last drop of the Season of Idle Lounging at my favorite idle lounging spot, Fernwood Country Club in Roseland, in what may have been its final season.

I would be lying if I described Fernwood — which is as much a country club as I am a supermodel — as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. But I would not be misrepresenting things if I described it as one of the wonders of my world. My husband and I have been describing it for years as feeling like a tired Catskills hotel, comfortable but down on its luck.

In fact, it was originally built as a fresh-air camp for children and mothers from Newark. It is a place of grass and trees, sagging lounge chairs and ramshackle white buildings, a place so relaxed that the tennis courts often have large cracks with weeds poking out, and buckets of patching tar spend the season watching every game from the sidelines.

It is the place where both of my children learned to swim, and where paperbacks and the papers usually go unread in favor of endless conversations. It is a place so homey that even on the first day of summer none of us feels the least bit self-conscious about the overabundance of pallid flesh.

You can read the rest in the New York Times archives.

— Debbie Galant

Authentically Local

Wed, 11 May 2011 10:57:00 -0400

The restaurant decorated with bright glass bottles, renowned for its French toast and its convivial atmosphere when the tables are set up for outside dining.

The dry cleaner who doesn’t need to be told that you like your shirts folded, not hung. Light starch.

The shop owner that runs down the street after you when you accidentally leave your credit card behind.

The hardware store with the sign that says, “Husbands cannot buy paint without a signed note from their wife.”

The local website that runs the picture of your missing dog – connecting you with the neighbor around the corner who found him.

Yes, you can eat at an Applebee’s or buy your paint from a Home Depot. You can buy your books on Amazon, or download them to a Kindle. You can use an iPhone app to find the closest movie. But there’s a difference between something that’s geographically convenient and something that’s authentically local.

And the difference is this: Local doesn’t scale. Local isn’t McDonald’s, even if the McDonald’s is right down the street. Local doesn’t send profits back to a home office somewhere else. Local is something that’s part of what makes where you are unique. As unique and flawed and loveable as your own kids. Something is authentically local if it’s the first thing you’d want an old friend, visiting from the other side of the world, to see. It’s authentically local if its disappearance could potentially break your heart.

Local is suddenly the newest, hippest, most lucrative frontier. The local advertising market alone is estimated to be $100 billion a year. Companies like AOL, Google, Apple and Groupon all want a piece of the action. Some of the devices they sell you are even collecting data about everywhere you go – all to help their local campaigns.

Certainly big corporations add a lot of convenience and consistency to our world. They also threaten to homogenize it. If you want home to feel different from everywhere else in the world – or if you want a world that’s interesting to explore, support what’s authentically local. Know the difference, and vive la difference!