Following local Altadena and Pasadena News

I’ve been thinking more about local news lately, so I’ve taken some time to aggregate some of my local news sources. While I live in the Los Angeles area, it’s not like I’m eschewing the Los Angeles Times, but I wanted to go even more uber-local than this. Thus I’m looking more closely at my local Altadena and Pasadena news outlets. I’m a bit surprised to see just how many small outlets and options I’ve got! People say local news is dying or dead, so I thought I would only find two or three options–how wrong could I have been?

In addition to some straightforward journalistic related news sources, I’ve also included some additional local flavor news which includes town councils, the chamber of commerce, historical societies, etc. which have websites that produce feeds with occasional news items.

Going forward you can see these sources aggregated on my following page.

For those who are interested I’ve created an OPML file which contains the RSS feeds of all these sources if they’d like to follow them as well. Naturally most have other social media presences, but there’s usually no guarantee that if you followed them that way that you’ll actually see the news you wanted.

If anyone is aware of other sources, I’m happy to add them to the list.

Here’s the initial list of sources:

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Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

9 thoughts on “Following local Altadena and Pasadena News”

  2. Chris Aldrich says:
    October 14, 2018 at 12:52 am

    @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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  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. Phoenix Tso says:
      October 17, 2018 at 4:28 pm

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

      Reply
      1. Chris Aldrich says:
        October 18, 2018 at 9:31 am

        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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