Letter: Dispatch Congrats; Leading The Charge

The Mission Viejo Dispatch celebrates its second anniversary this month as a true community blog for Mission Viejo. While leading the charge to hold city hall accountable to the voters and taxpayers, the Dispatch also covers a wide variety of topics, such as schools, crime news, civic groups and events, sports and people news.

There are several ways to quantify the Dispatch’s reach into the community:

• Comments to postings come from an increasingly wide number of people, who are required to give their names. Just go to comments on recent postings to see for yourself.
• An activist volunteer website, MissionViejoBusiness.com, which also promotes the community, had been getting as small, steady number of daily hits, but hits swelled to more than two hundred after the website was linked in a Dispatch posting.
• Both the business website and the community blog are strictly volunteer, so the breadth of Dispatch coverage could only be accomplished with news tips from readers and information offered up by community organizations. Still both sites are labor intensive and cannot be realized without hundreds of volunteer hours.
• Big-time help to the Dispatch inadvertently comes from city hall officials and their citizen apologists whose attempted attacks on the blog’s accuracy and integrity bring attention to it. The blog’s credibility soars when subsequent events show the Dispatch not only is accurate but well tuned into the community. The latest example is the dog park approval by the council majority, about to undergo an embarrassing reversal at Monday’s city council meeting.

Congratulations to the Mission Viejo Dispatch for two successful years of community service.

Allan Pilger

Tagged as: Allan Pilger, Mission Viejo Dispatch, Mission Viejo News