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Classifieds

Publicaiton date: January 28, 2000

Around Pleasanton

A paper for our town

by Jeb Bing

Welcome to the Pleasanton Weekly, your window on every aspect of our community. We'll be in your mailbox or at your business and in street newsstands around town every Friday, delivered free of charge and focusing exclusively on Pleasanton.

Over the years, thanks to outstanding leadership and foresight, Pleasanton has become a nationally recognized city of planned progress. We have a celebrated business park, an historic and vibrant downtown, one of the region's finest shopping centers, an outstanding school district and a highly educated, motivated population. Now we have our very own newspaper as well.

Our goal at the Pleasanton Weekly is to provide the most accurate and consistently reliable news coverage and commentary of interest to all of us who live and work here. That means information on current events, including City Council and school board actions, local sports and arts and entertainment features. We'll also include letters to the editor and guest columns, such as the thought-provoking opinion pieces by Craig Scharton and Dolores Bengston in today's issue. We want the Weekly to be your regular forum for expressing views on the diverse issues affecting life in Pleasanton.

Since we're advertising supported, we will also offer the very best in retail, real estate, service, entertainment and classified advertising - again, targeted exclusively to our Pleasanton audience. By focusing on our community, we're confident the Weekly will be the most cost-effective method for advertisers to reach every Pleasanton resident.

The Pleasanton Weekly is owned by Embarcadero Publishing Co., which began publishing its first newspaper - the Palo Alto Weekly -- in 1979. The company also publishes The Almanac in Menlo Park and the Mountain View Voice, and all three newspapers focus exclusively on the communities they serve.

We'll be following that same successful format, with a staff that knows Pleasanton and is active in the community. People like Chris Paterson, our advertising manager, who has extensive newspaper sales and marketing experience in Pleasanton and the Tri-Valley. And reporters Liz Cloutman and Jeff Williams (a 1994 graduate of Foothill High), who live in Pleasanton. Art director Shannon Corey has more than five years of art director experience and, like Paterson and Williams, holds a degree from San Jose State University.

Bob Thomas, president of the Weekly, joined Embarcadero two years ago from his position as general manager of East Bay Express. For myself, I moved with my family to Vintage Hills in 1987. I've owned a public relations firm, written extensively for local publications, continue to be active in civic organizations and earlier, for 13 years, was an editor and reporter at the Chicago Tribune. My three children are graduates or attending Amador High.

With this kind of experience and commitment, the Weekly will serve as an exciting, enjoyable medium for Pleasanton. And, we're convinced Pleasanton is ripe for its own community newspaper.

After extensive research and meetings with community leaders, it was clear to Thomas, Embarcadero President Bill Johnson and their management team that Pleasanton would enthusiastically support a high quality and intensely local newspaper produced by editorial and advertising specialists from Pleasanton. The two dailies serving the area have grown into large, regional newspapers, with only about a third of Pleasanton households now on their subscription lists. We saw an opportunity for a weekly newspaper to complement their offerings with tightly focused content and advertising relating only to Pleasanton.

While many of you, like me, will continue reading one of these metropolitan dailies, we'll work at providing you greater details, context, analysis and opinion that is exclusively Pleasanton. We'll have stories about people and not institutions. In our coverage of City Council, school board and commission meetings, we'll seek to write about the issues they are addressing and not simply the meetings themselves.

Nor will we rely on news events or meeting agendas to drive our content. We'll anticipate news and look for interesting trends or issues that are worth digging into. We want to tell you - our readers - what's going to happen, not just what did happen.

Most of all, both in our print editions and on our Web site (http://www.PleasantonWeekly.com), we'll look for your input, your letters and e-mails, your phone calls. We're not just exclusively Pleasanton; we're exclusively yours.

Good reading!