Welcome to La Verne Online
Get Ready ‘Cause Here We Come, Again!
A local newspaper recently reported that La Verne ranked as the third best place to live in the San Gabriel Valley. We fared well against our local peers in CNN/Money’s methodology that measured median home price ($557,000), median income ($87,197), job growth (14.11), reading test scores (40.5), math test scores (-7.2 below the state average), personal crime (2 per 1,000 people) and property crime (24 per 1,000 people). None of us, however, made the magazine’s national top 100. That honor was bestowed on cities like No. 1 Plymouth, Minn., No. 2 Fort Collins, Colo., No. 3 Naperville, Ill., and No. 4 Irvine, Calif.
That got us thinking: Why couldn’t we be a top 100 city? What were we missing that the others had? One hundred people, of course, will give you 100 different answers, but for us, that missing element was and has always been a great newspaper. What if La Verne truly had one hometown newspaper that brought its citizens closer together , touching and celebrating their lives, one that taught and inspired, one that gave everyone a keener sense of time and place and purpose.
We almost had one. We launched The Neighborhood Paper, a biweekly newspaper, in 2002, and it was growing well and really resonating with readers when some out-of-the blue health issues (cracking your ribs, puncturing a lung and contracting a hospital borne illness) knocked us to the sidelines. We’re back now, but we’re back with a new perspective.
This time, we’ll be telling La Verne’s story online. That’s where you are, that’s where your kids are. That’s where you get your information. That’s where you shop. That’s where you get your coupons. Moreover, hundreds, even thousands, of you now have your own websites, selling candles, orange crate labels, baseball videos, you name it. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone in town knew there was always one online source they could instantly visit to find your link? So, we’ve moved online for one reason: to serve you better. We’ll save on gas, spare some trees, and your paper won’t land in the gutter, on the roof of your car or on the sidewalk to trip your cat, anymore.
Our nickname for the LaVerneOnline is EVE. It stands for Enjoyable Viewer Experience. We want you to be able to visit the newspaper at anytime for the latest news about real estate, health, fitness, education, business, sports, dining out, travel and all the exciting, intriguing people who call La Verne home. We’ll follow every news thread that goes into the making of this fantastic fabric of a community.
Are we up for the job? If you count pulling my red wagon through the streets of Inglewood selling The Los Angeles Herald Examiner when I was five-years-old, I’ve been in the journalism business for almost 50 years. In college, I wrote for the Stanford Daily. In the ‘80s, I worked for the Los Angeles Times, where my articles were syndicated nationally. For five years, I was the managing editor of American Bungalow, a magazine the Chicago Tribune called one of the best in the nation. For many years, I was a senior communications manager for a city, a sports organization and several leading, and as it turned out, over-zealous and overreaching financial firms. Colleen has been an outstanding Realtor in La Verne and the San Gabriel Valley for almost two decades. Her start, however, was in the entertainment field, where she worked on such television programs as “The Merv Griffin Show,” “Dance Fever” and “Wheel of Fortune.”
That Wheel of Fortune is still spinning, and we say to all of you, “Top 100 here we come.” A great town deserves a great newspaper, and we’re going to try our very best to give you one. Call us, email us, meet us. We’re listening.
For more information about LaVerneOnline and the ideas we have for your newspaper, see Interview with Peter Bennett.
Publishers Peter and Colleen Bennett
PS. If you’re looking to save money, always go to our coupon page to see all the great values our vendors and advertisers are offering. The news can usually wait, but great deals can’t, and we’ve got ‘em.
Peter with actor and motivational speaker Glenn Morshower in Sunset Beach, Calif.Delia takes aim at National Night Out!
