Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news.
The good news is that you don’t know how great
you can be! How much you can love! What you can
accomplish! And what your potential is!
— Anne Frank
Tina Valentino is the Editor/Publisher
What’s in a domain name? That which we call local by any other name would smell as sweet…
Actually, I think it stinks. My Oak Park friend Matt Baron, who contributes great local stories to Neighbors magazine, gave me my first whiff of the landfill-like odor in his blog “Chicago Tribune’s Hyper-Hyper-Local Push” at www.insideedgepr.com a few weeks before Christmas. Despite decades of raking in obscene amounts of revenue from sections upon sections of display advertising, classified and the lottery of legal notices, the Tribune still filed for bankruptcy in 2008. A few years later, they launched TribLocal to gain a better foothold in the suburbs, which they have essentially ignored, with the exception of obituaries. Where do tyrants and dictators go when their coffers dry up? Into the little villages to pillage and plunder, to take and to charge and to expand their kingdoms.
The “Honey, I shrunk the newspaper” Chicago Sun-Times and its 39 suburban tag-alongs gave readers a swell Christmas gift by charging newbies and current subscribers to read all Sun-Times Media websites. And, with AOL’s Patch.com webpages of local news steadily encroaching what TribLocal imagined would be its own dynasty, a new year is as good a time as any to test fire an internet missile. On November 28, the Tribune Company bought up over 300 (334 to be exact) domain names such as RiverGroveTribune.com, BellwoodTribune.com, MelroseParkTribune.com, HillsideTribune.com. Somehow they missed Westchester, Northlake and North Riverside as this issue goes to press. For a company not even close to emerging from bankruptcy protection, this is quite a zealous, expensive—and pathetically predictable—venture. The Chicago well has run dry so let’s pretend 1) that we really care about what’s happening in the suburbs while 2) we start tapping into suburban businesses while promising them a phenomenal internet “circulation.” Smells like the perfume of a rotten egg, alright. Armed with a pen and paper in one hand and my camera in the other, I have covered people and progress in the suburbs since 1982. So many times I’ve said to myself, “This is such an extraordinary event”—to listen to astronaut Lee Archambault in Bellwood, to meet Dr. Percy Julian’s daughter in Maywood, to tour the Borsato Museum in Northlake, to celebrate the centennial in Forest Park, to participate in Veterans Day in Franklin Park, to experience the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Melrose Park—and, yet, where were the Trib and Sun-Times? Nowhere to be found.
“We cannot make good news out of bad practice.” Edward R. Murrow should know. In 2012, Neighbors Magazine will continue its proven practice of delivering good, local news—in print for free, online for free and networking through Facebook. Because I believe, like Anne Frank, that everyone has inside of him or her a piece of good news, a story to tell, a goal to accomplish and I try to help it along even though we have only one lackluster local domain name. Happy New Year, neighbors. How great can we be, how much can we love and accomplish in 2012?
Tina Valentino is the Editor and Publisher of Neighbors, a FREE publication that spotlights the western suburbs and partners advertisers with award-winning stories. Neighbors Magazine – “Everyone has one” is distributed each month via high-traffic retail and/or commercial outlets throughout Bellwood, Berkeley, Elmwood Park, Forest Park, Franklin Park, Hillside, Maywood, Melrose Park, Northlake, North Riverside, Oak Park, River Forest, River Grove, Schiller Park, Stone Park and Westchester. www.neighborsmagazine.com
