No Updates on WG Resident Website

A few weeks ago, WGx almost published an article about the Silicon Valley Community News group’s slowly disappearing websites. Here’s what WGx almost said, circa early May (in a story about a supplemental WG home tour):

As an aside, WGx prefers to send readers to the actual Silicon Valley Community Newspaper website over the Merc’s reproductions, but the Saratoga News site hasn’t been updated since February. Now a days, you have to go find that area’s online news from the Mercury.

Hopefully the Willow Glen Resident’s website will not become similarly ignored, but maybe that’s what SVCN Executive Editor Dale Bryant was talking about in her cryptic editorial a few weeks ago …

The words never actually printed here turned out to be prescient anyway. … of course, they wouldn’t have been “printed” here (in the traditional sense) — and that’s apparently the problem.

Simply put, WG Resident’s website has not been updated recently, even though three weekly editions have been printed since the last electronic story, reproduced from the May 30 edition. Before that, it often took days for the printed stories to appear online, if they ever did.

For now, the WG Resident website is strangely out-of-date, perhaps forever:

We are in the process of moving the online versions of the Campbell Reporter/San Jose Residents to a dedicated community website at www.mercurynews.com. Until those sites are online, weekly news stories will be posted here. Many of our local stories for this paper are currently posted at www.mercurynews.com/valley.

Dale Bryant has been keeping print readers up to date, ever since the SVCN papers were acquired by Knight-Ridder (the Merc’s former parent company) in 2006. Knight-Ridder, which was in-turn sold to MediaNews:

An era in American journalism ended June 23 [2006] with the sale of Knight Ridder to the McClatchy Company. By virtue of our having been acquired by Knight Ridder shortly before the company put itself up for sale in response to shareholder pressure, Silicon Valley Community Newspapers was a piece of that historic moment.

The trend of SVCN stories appearing in the Mercury News (and on its website) began almost two years ago, and has continued ever since.

A few months ago, Bryant spoke to the website dilemma with an article printed in the WG Resident (although not readily available on its own actual website):

Our Web site, which served us well for a number of years, had begun to overwhelm us. We couldn’t keep up with it, and it just wasn’t possible for us to keep it current with breaking news. Our weekly news cycle worked against us and made our Web site look more and more out of touch.

That’s why we were excited when we had the opportunity to post our weekly papers online at mercurynews.com. It clearly was a good move for us, but it worked two ways. Not only would the San Jose Mercury News benefit by having more local news for its online edition, our reporters and photographers could keep our papers up to date with breaking news during the week.

And the June 19 edition of the Willow Glen Resident included another note from Bryant, explaining the shrinking size of the actual newspapers as a result of the current economic climate. Many of the local Resident papers had already moved to less content anyway, duplicating content and carrying different localized ads.

Bottom line: Looks like there is no independent local news website for the Willow Glen neighborhood, except maybe this one. Maybe

And hopefully, their site will remain accessible to internet users, since it is still a great archive of news from a bygone era.