To all staff, collaborators and readers of The Sacramento Press. I would like to briefly introduce our new Editor in Chief, Colleen Belcher. For most of you, Colleen needs no introduction because she has personally worked with literally hundreds of contributors and everyone on our small staff. You all know her glowing smile and her indefatigable spirit. Colleen started working as an intern at The Sacramento Press even before there was a live website. I remember how instrumental she was at setting the tone with that first group of interns and staff. She created a sense of camaraderie with her fellow interns while setting a very hardworking pace for all of us continue to follow. We hired

A couple of days ago, something noteworthy happened on The Sacramento Press: We passed 10,000 articles on the site. These are all original works, and they are all local news and information about Sacramento. Some are of no real consequence. Some are even factually incorrect. But they are written by more than 1,000 different people with unique and valuable perspectives on our region (some professional, most amateur). Not only that, many of these stories are of major civic importance. All one has to do is visit our front page any day, and the laid-out portion across the top will be filled with stories that affect our daily lives. Some people don’t like our experiment for one reason or anot

I'm proud to announce that The Sacramento Press hit a major milestone. In two and a half years we have published work from over 1,000 unique authors. A few are employees here and many are interns, but the vast majority are community contributors. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you to all of our contributors! What does this number really mean? There are a lot of big numbers flying around these days. AOL probably has plans for more Patches than we have had unique authors. Facebook just hit 750 million users. Compared to that 1,000 seems so small. But "small" is precisely the point. Our small team has worked diligently to foster a deeply informed and engaged community. We know many

During the debate on a “strong mayor” system of government, each side battled over which form of government allowed for the greatest accountability to the public, democratic ideals in decision making and open debate of policy. After a fateful 5-4 vote not to promote Gus Vina to full-time city manager and his subsequent resignation, I know that the council system we currently have is seriously broken. Why? Not because of the vote itself or Vina’s decision. But because the debate and vote were conducted behind closed doors in a closed session. I have no idea why the council decided not to promote Vina. Council members refuse to talk with our reporters about the decision. Wait, what? Yes, y

There are not a lot of solid rules for starting up a hyper-local site fueled by community contribution. We think, rethink and question just about every policy and design choice for The Sacramento Press. We strive to act with integrity as individuals and as an organization. Our highest principles at The Sacramento Press are openness and transparency. Our policy is to allow anyone to publish. Then we and our community read, rate, flag, comment and add to the story. We ask our contributors to use their real names. We ask them to stay local and to disclose their affiliation with the issues they write about. Recently there was considerable debate here and elsewhere on the Web about our polic