Editor, Flavia Potenza
“WE’RE CONFUSED!”
Our community has given us feedback and, in the way it’s supposed to work, we’re listening. It seems readers can’t wrap their minds around Topanga as a two-newspaper town. As a result, we receive emails complaining that readers can’t find a particular article and the reason is we didn’t publish it. It was the “other paper.”
We’ve experienced some confusion ourselves as we’ve struggled to define The Canyon Chronicle and how it differs from the Topanga New Times. Thanks to your feedback, we finally decided on a tag line: “Topanga’s Independent Voice Since1976.” Look at it. Savor it. It carries a lineage and a legacy in that statement.
To our point, we have one foot in our past and our sights set in the future. Admittedly, the Canyon Chronicle has only been around for two months, five editions. There’s certainly no legacy or lineage there.
I was the founding editor of the Topanga Messenger in 1976; that is the through line to the now. It’s not about me and some egotistical out-of-control drive to keep creating newspapers. It’s about ensuring that the service a newspaper provides has a solid business foundation that anyone with an independent spirit, open mind, and the required skills can pick up and carry on.
She may hate me for saying this, but Mary Colvig was the rock who kept the Topanga Messenger going for 40 years. By 2016, no one was in the line of succession and the paper was struggling. In a gallant flourish, she closed the business 40 years to the day on which it was first published, December 1, 2016, and left a legacy that was not about her alone, but a community.
R.I.P. Topanga Messenger—1976-2016. The community was shocked, people were depressed at losing something so entwined with their lives.
