Small Paper - Small Dollars

Sometimes it's easy to lose track of what's really important...as Ron and Anna Winship point out...

Geoff West, and his A Bubbling Cauldron blog, has a good little piece about our Daily Pilot's Political Reporter Alicia Robinson and her moving on to a much larger Riverside Press-Enterprise.

For those who have "built" relationships with the local reporters who cover Newport Beach, this happens way too often, whether it was S.J. Cahn, or June Casagrande, or Jean Pasco, Rebecca Schoenkopf, or even Jeff Overley (maybe he's on vacation). You always looked for their articles at the papers because they always had something interesting to say (well...maybe not so much with S.J...).

At least Scott Moxley's still around...

Now it's Alicia Robinson. In the few years she's been here, she's done a good job. She's always been at all the events. She's always been relatively fair. And she's always accepted the criticism and well-natured ribbing well.

But that's how it goes with small paper reporters. Small dollars and annoying local Bloggers calling...it's just not worth it.

When Jean Pasco left the LA Times to go work for the County of Orange, I asked Alicia if she would make a run for her job. After all, the LA Times owns the Daily Pilot, and they are even in the same building. But nothing.

Maybe the Daily Pilot should take note of how the OC Register has done it to keep their Political Reporters. When you go to the OC Register, you always click on articles by Frank Mickadeit, Martin Wiskol, Peggy Lowe and Steve Greenhut to see what political wisdom we didn't previously know about. But they primarily covered OC as a whole.

It's like reading the LA Times. You know they had a section about Orange County, but you knew they focus primarily on Los Angeles.

Now the new Daily Pilot political reporter will have to learn all the names and faces and issues anew, just in time for the impending fun and games with City Hall/Rehab Homes/Airport, and that's just in Newport Beach.

At least Alicia will have her hands full with the Political mayhem that lives in Riverside. And there are lots and lots of it!

However, the readers in Riverside will enjoy Alicia's words.

Good luck Alicia and thanks for reading this babble.

You will be missed.