Albany Today

Dear Readers of Albany Today:

Happy New Year! I want to share with you some stories behind the news stories on Albany Today, and my plans and wishes for this community news website as the year of 2008 comes.

I started Albany Today in mid September as a project for my Reporting and Writing class. All students in the class were assigned to set up a news website for a Bay Area city, and post news stories on it in the course of the semester.

Now all my classmates have stopped posting on their websites as the semester ended, but I am still reporting and writing on Albany Today.

I keep writing because I enjoy doing it and because you are encouraging me.

Many of you have told me that you like Albany Today in person or by email. The website got nearly ten thousand page views in the past three months. (The exact number is 9,672 views up until now.) Several hundred Albany residents are reading it regularly.

When the oil spill came to pollute Albany’s shoreline, I was the first and the only reporter that covered it, taking pictures on the pollution and getting the news out to the community immediately. On the first few days of the spill nobody knew when the Coast Guard would send people to clean the fouled beach, Mayor Robert Lieber patted on my shoulder at a volunteer gathering and said, “we can use our local reporter to express our concerns.”

I was glad to be regarded as a “local” reporter, although I’ve just come to this community several months ago from another country.

I was glad that City Councilmember Joanne Wile went to help Katherine Cody, a homeless living on Albany Bulb, to see a doctor and get food stamps, after she read a story about Cody on Albany Today.

I was glad when Albany resident Susan Adame told me that she printed out 20 copies of my story on the Albany Pool rebuilding plan to give to the pool users who were eager to read the story but didn’t know where to find it.

I am glad that MacGregor High School printed out the story about their community-outreach event and posted it in the middle of the bulletin board in its lobby.

“You are making Albany a better place one story at a time, ” one reader said to me. This is an overpraise. But it’s one of the goals I aspire to achieve with Albany Today. A community can make wiser decisions when its members are better informed. And I want Albany Today to be a timely and truthful messenger for Albany.

I am grateful to be a reporter in a close and supportive community. I couldn’t finish a single story without you talking to me and sharing your stories and ideas. And luckily, I am seldom turned down by whomever I ask questions to in Albany.

I want to express my special thanks to Superintendent William Wong, who would always squeeze my interviews into his busy schedules; to School Board President Charles Blanchard, who goes out of his way to answer my questions on various school issues; to Councilmember Jewel Okawachi, who picked up my phone calls late at night and patiently talked to me for a number of times; to Councilmember Joanne Wile, who first informed me of the oil spill and kept updating me on the bird rescue work; to Mayor Robert Lieber, who has never shunned my questions but encouraged me to ask whatever I wanted to know; to Ira Sharenow, an avid reader of Albany Today who gave me lots of good advice on how to improve the website; to Arthur Simon, an Albany resident who took me to a Richmond towing yard to get the story on recovering a stolen car.

There are many more people in the community that helped me in writing Albany Today. I want to thank you all.

Please continue to support Albany Today. Let me know of issues you think I should write about, give me advice on how to improve and promote the website, and point out my mistakes whenever you see them. I am careful but it’s hard to completely avoid mistakes since I am not a native speaker of English and I don’t have an editor to double-check my writings.

Please use the comment function of the website more. There have been several dozen comments posted by you on Albany Today, but it could have been much more, since it’s such an easy way to get your opinions out. People can read your comment immediately after you post it, whereas you have to wait for days to know whether your letter be published on a newspaper or not. And I can publish your commentary as an independent entry if you’d like to get the attention of all the readers of Albany Today.

Let’s make Albany Today even better in the new year. There are many important events going on or coming up, such as the selection of a new superintendent for the school district, the voting on a bond measure for the new swimming pool project, the planning for Albany’s waterfront, the election of two new City Council members, etc. I am looking forward to timely informing you of the significant issues going on in the community, and keeping track of them on Albany Today with my writing and pictures. I also plan to post video clips on the website in future to provide you news stories in richer forms.

It would be a challenge for me to squeeze adequate time from my school to work on Albany Today. But I will try my best to keep it running nicely.

Sincerely,

Linda (Linjun) Fan

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 11:58 pm and is filed under People in Albany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.