By Neena Strichart
Publisher
In response to my column last week regarding the Grunion’s announcement to launch a paper up in our area, we have received dozens of phone calls, notes and emails encouraging us to “keep up the good work.” A few even gave suggestions on how we could save money. One idea offered was to stop distributing door to door and just bulk drop around town. No, thanks – we’ve been told that our readers enjoy having easy access to our paper. Others mentioned charging for the paper. No, that is a losing proposition- we do however offer paid mailed subscriptions for only $45 a year- and are happy to accept voluntary subscriptions for those who already receive the paper on their doorsteps yet chose to support the paper. Our plans are to just keep giving our readers and advertisers the best service we can.
We love covering local events in Bixby Knolls, California Heights, Wrigley and Signal Hill- including the latter’s council meetings. We have little room left over for happenings outside of our readership. Besides, we figure if our readers want information from out of our area they will turn to other papers or websites that specialize in dealing with news away from our little corner of the world.
We do our best to concentrate on articles or news items that pertain to us- and spend little or no time trying to compete with the big guys on big stories- why waste resources on redundancy?
We didn’t cover the big fire at Galaxy Towers on Ocean Avenue last year that tragically resulted in a fatality. Why? Two reasons- not our territory- and, being a weekly, the news would have been quite stale at the time of our publication. We do instead concentrate on stories like what’s going on with Connected Corridor and who is running for local office. Unlike other area news sources, we DO NOT endorse candidates. I’m not going to get involved in all of that.
Also, if our readers want to know which married politician is sleeping with whom- they aren’t going to get that gossip here. There are other Long Beach news sources that are happy to report that type of monkey business. We’d rather use our editorial space to tell you about what’s happening at neighborhood Wrigley meetings or why the Atlantic Avenue offramp is still closed. We don’t do extensive coverage of the Toyota Grand Prix or Sea Festival either. But we do write about the Bixby Knolls car show and First Fridays. We choose to spend our ink and paper to connect our readers to one another – and we’re proud of that.
