Following local Altadena and Pasadena News

8 thoughts on “Following local Altadena and Pasadena News”

1. @pasindependent I tried to subscribe to your RSS feed, but it redirects to your homepage instead of any type of xml or feed file.​

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2. @lpachter I get the impression that you follow some of this relatively closely. Caltech news is certainly worthwhile given the impact on local economy. Have I missed anything else good?

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3. Replied to @PasadenaGov on Twitter

   @PasadenaGov You’ve got a lovely and simple WordPress site that has the built-in functionality to put out news via RSS. Why have you shut it off?​
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4. Replied to Introducing Alhambra Source’s new publisher by Staff (Alhambra Source)

   Jon Thurber, a veteran journalist whose long career at the Los Angeles Times included serving as managing editor of the print edition, has been named publisher of the Alhambra Source.

   Thurber held a number of other management positions at the Times, including news obituary editor and editor of the book review, and he was also a leader of the paper’s reinvention committee as the Times transitioned from a predominantly print product to refocus its efforts on digital publication.

   “Jon has the experience and vision to move the Alhambra Source forward to an even more dynamic civic institution in Alhambra and the larger SGV,” said Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Professor of Communication and Sociology Emerita at USC Annenberg School for Communication and one of the founders of the Alhambra Source.

   Congratulations both to and on the new publisher!
   I’ve recently begun reading a variety of more local news sources, most of which are built on the WordPress CMS, as is your publication. As a digital native, I often prefer reading my news via RSS feeds, but I find it surprising that many local SGV sources have (accidentally?) broken or are mismanaging their feeds.
   I notice that the Alhambra Source’s main feed only contains the “News Round up” articles which primarily feature news in other outlets. While this type of advertising for and promotion of others’ work is nice, I’m subscribed to many of them already and would prefer a single feed with all of the Alhambra Source’s own original work instead! In fact, because I automatically subscribed to the AS’s main feed without looking at the site first, I was under the mistaken impression that it only did aggregation rather than original reporting, an impression which is obviously the opposite of reality.
   Because a “main” feed is not available, I’m forced to subscribe to 8 separate feeds to attempt to get all of the great work coming out of AS. This feels like a bit much and could be easily fixed on your back end. A better solution would be to have your main feed include all of your articles (perhaps including the News Roundup), and then still provide the separate category-based feeds for those who are only interested in the subsections of news. (This would typically be the default for an out of the box WordPress installation.)
   Finally, I’ve noticed that your feeds don’t include any of the photos featured in the articles, which is a shame since the site has some generally nice photography (particularly in comparison to competitors) to go along with the stories.
   If you need any technical help, I’m happy to assist as I’d love to see better local news and events coverage in the Pasadena/SGV areas.
   Congratulations again!

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   1. Thanks for your suggestions and for reading us! Are you subscribed to our newsletter? We don’t optimize for RSS feeds at the moment.

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      1. From what I can tell, it would appear that someone tweaked your feeds at one time and then abandoned them. If you rolled back to the WordPress out-of-the-box default, you’d have an excellent and flexible solution. My guess is that even an intermediate WordPress developer could do it in under 20 minutes. My suspicion is that you’ve got a simple plugin that’s causing the wonky behavior right now–removing it would also remove a chunk of custom code and speed up your site at the same time. I’m happy to help if you don’t have someone on staff for these types of changes.

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5. Replied to It’s time for a new branch of public media by Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)

   President Lyndon B Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967, which established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Previously, an independent public broadcaster had been established through grants by the Ford Foundation, but Ford began to withdraw its support.
   Here’s what he said:
   “It…

   I’ve been thinking very similarly along these lines for six months or more, but with a particular slant at journalistic enterprises. I’ve specifically been considering what would happen if small local newspapers and other journalistic outlets were running IndieWeb-esque platforms for their local communities. This would potentially help to moderate and encourage local conversations and consumption of local grown content and journalism and potentially improve the toxicity of general social media or massive issues like those that Facebook is facing with genocidal effects of their platform in Myanmar where they didn’t have any local presence or moderation much less people in-house who had language capabilities to even begin to deal with these issues. This type of mission could better empower entities to improve both local journalism by binding it to a different substrate as a financial model  and fix many of the issues we see with social media simultaneously.
   This general idea also isn’t too dissimilar from Greg McVerry’s idea of having local libraries allow patrons to “check out” (aka set up) their own domains and social presences/identities using their library cards.
   The difficulty I see is that as the world moves toward increased specialization, that looking for newspapers or even municipalities to oversee and maintain such infrastructure may be difficult. I already see issues with smaller outlets building and maintaining their own publishing platforms with simple out-of-the-box CMS solutions that are relatively easy-to-use and modify with simple plugins. (In a recent inventory of my local news sources, I’ll note here that nearly 100% of the local online news sources for my community are running on WordPress, but not all of them have a huge amount of technical knowledge about what and how they’re doing it in those spaces). The growth of content management systems like Ghost, which has a journalistic bent, also indicates that there isn’t a “perfect solution” to the CMS problem, much less the issues of running IndieWeb-like platforms/clusters based on simpler platforms like WordPress or even Known. There’s certainly a lot of space out there for third party companies to help grow and expand in both of these areas (community-based social platforms as well as journalism platforms and admixtures thereof.)
   If local institutions or even governments did move in this direction, then their users are at the potential mercy of third-party businesses which may not necessarily be aligned with local values.  An example of something akin to this was covered recently in The Daily on their episode Taking Over Local News. I’m also reminded about of my poor experiences  with un-moderated third party platforms like Nextdoor.com can be.
   Another microcosm to look at is how hundreds of thousands of public libraries are interfacing with the four or more media suppliers of e-books and what that financial model looks like as, if taken, I would suspect a similar trajectory for local social public media. Similarly looking at how municipalities interface with cable franchising can reveal some pitfalls to avoid moving forward with respect to monopolies and competition.
   Certainly some additional thought about how to solve these issues at the smaller local and personal levels is welcome. Thanks for dipping into and expanding my surface area of thinking Ben.

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6. Replied to Keeping track of my media diet by Paul Jacobson (Paul Jacobson)

   This idea of tracking my media diet really appeals to me:

   Just like last year, I kept track of almost everything I read, watched, listened to, and experienced in my media diet posts.
   Jason Kottke

   I follow a few people who do this too, sometimes pretty publicly. I’m not sure that I’d want to share everything I consume, but I do like the thought of capturing, and aggregating everything.
   I’m just not too sure how to pull it all together, if I were to do this.

   There are a few parts to having a media diet:
   1. keeping track of it all quickly and easily;
   2. going back to contemplate on it and deciding what may have been worthwhile or not; and
   3. using the above to improve upon your future media diet instead of consuming the same junk food in the future.
   I try to use my own website (cum digital commonplace book) to collect everything quickly using bookmarklets from the Post Kinds plugin or RSS feeds from popular media-related websites (GoodReads, Letterboxd, reading.am, etc.) in conjunction with IFTTT.com recipes to create private posts on my site’s back end. Naturally, not all of my posts are public since many are simply for my own reflection and edification. Usually logging the actions only takes a few seconds. Longer reviews and thoughts typically only take a few minutes if I choose to do so.
   The hardest part may be going through it all on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis to do some analysis and make the appropriate adjustments for the future. (Isn’t it always sticking with the adjustments that make it a “diet”?) Fortunately having all the data in one centralized place does make some of this work a lot easier.
   Having lists of what I read online has definitely helped me cut out all click-baity articles and listicles from my information diet. It’s also helped me cut down on using social media mindlessly when I think about the great things I could be reading or consuming instead. Bad national news has also spurred me to read more local news this year as well. Those interested in some of these ideas may appreciate Clay A. Johnson’s The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Comsumption, which I read several years back.
   I experimented with eating and drinking posts early last year too, and the nature of posting them publicly was somewhat useful in losing about 10 pounds, but the work in doing it all did seem a bit much since I didn’t have as easily an automated system for doing it as I might have liked. Now I do most of these posts privately. Definitely having the ability to look back at the ton of crap I’ve eaten in the past week or month does help with trying to be a bit healthier in my choices. I look at posting photos of my food/drink to my own site somewhat akin to dietitians who tell people to use a clean plate for every meal they have–the extra work, process, and clean up makes it more apparent what you’re doing to yourself.
   As I’ve written before about posting what I’m listening to, showing others that you’ve spent the time to actually listen to it and post about it on your own site (even with no commentary), is a great way to show that you’ve got “skin-in-the-game” when it comes to making recommendations. Kottke’s awesome recommendation about listening to the Seeing White Podcast has way more value if he could point to having spent the multiple hours listening to and contemplating it, the way I have. The situation is akin to that headline and link my friend just put on Twitter, but did she think the headline was cool or did she actually read the entire thing and wanted to recommend her followers also read it? Who can tell without some differentiation?
   Lastly, I keep a “following page” of people and feeds I’m following on a regular basis. Put into broad categories, it makes an easy method for periodically pruning out that portion of my media diet using OPML subscriptions in my feed reader.
   In the end, what you feed your body, as well as what you feed your brain, are important things to at least keep in the back of your mind.
    

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