Gretna Wilkinson. (Click to enlarge)
Press release from Red Bank Regional High
Gretna Wilkinson, Red Bank Regional’s (RBR) acclaimed creative writing teacher, was recently notified that her website and literary blog, the Raven’s Perch, was selected as one of the top 100 literary blogs on the web by Feedspot.com, a website aggregator.
redbankgreen is pleased to introduce a new page. Headed “redbankgreen Sports powered by Shore Sports Zone,” it’s where you’ll find local sports news, much of it in the form of highly polished video reporting by Rich Chrampanis, founder of the independent website Shore Sports Zone, which is also debuting this week.
Chrampanis, who grew up in Middletown and graduated from Christian Brothers Academy (’88), is a veteran at this. After graudating from St. Bonaventure, he spent two decades in television sports coverage as an on-air reporter, anchor and producer. After 14 years at piloting the sports desk at WPDE-TV in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Chrampanis moved his family to Little Silver earlier this year to create Shore Sports Zone. With detailed school pages and timely video coverage, Chrampanis hopes to make the site the top resource for fans of high school sports in Monmouth and Ocean Counties.
We at redbankgreen hope to help him put it across the goal line while offering our readers something we haven’t had in the eight years this site has been around. So tune in here for hyperlocal sports coverage, and get the bigger picture at Shore Sports Zone.
We hope you find both our sports page and Shore Sports Zone informative and entertaining. Let us know what you think.
By DUSTIN RACIOPPI
Just a few days before Middletown is set to introduce its budget, the phone lines are buzzing.
Who’s calling? That’s the mystery.
The callers identify themselves members of the Concerned Citizens of Middletown and slam the township committee for “excessive spending” and “engaging in an elaborate shell game” with tax dollars.
The robocalls have residents and township officials questioning the source and legitimacy of the messages. At least two rounds of calls have been reported.
“It appears to be just another desperate attempt by the Middletown Democrats to spread misinformation to the taxpayers,” Mayor Tony Fiore said.
Teicia Gaupp at Zebu Forno recently. Her house on Tower Hill Avenue, below, as it appeared for many months… (Click to enlarge)
Teicia Gaupp of Red Bank has a wreck of a story to tell. And in the manner of confessional bloggers, she’s going to tell it.
For almost two years, Gaupp, her husband, Rob, and two young sons had to endure the indignity of walking away from a home-remodeling project gone sour, sticking their Tower Hill Avenue neighbors with the unsightly vision of an unfinished, plywood-sheathed hulk.
The Gaupps had bought the house, then a two-family, in 2001, a year before they were married. She worked in the Manhattan media swirl, he in environmental engineering. The effort to turn the place into their single-family dream home began in August, 2008.
But almost immediately, things started going wrong.
It’s as Jersey as the Sopranos: the Star-Ledger’s Munchmobile, a van with a giant polyurethane wiener on the roof that tours the state every summer in search of the best eats ice cream, burgers, Italian, seafood, whatever.
Well, yesterday was a special ‘blunch’ edition of the weekly tour to which a half-dozen of the state’s independent bloggers were invited. And even though redbankgreen rankles at the ‘blog’ label, we set aside our semantic tic and climbed aboard, not wanting to miss out on what some people consider the ride of a lifetime.
Also on board? Two other hyperlocal news sites Hoboken411 and Baristanet, which serves Montclair, Glen Ridge and Bloomfield and two foodie sites Off the Broiler and Go Out Jersey.
On the menu? Pizza.
First stop? Brothers Pizza on West Front Street right here in Red Bank, followed by a handful of other places scattered around north Jersey.
That public forum on government responsiveness we told you about immediately below this post?
We’ve solved the mystery about the date: it’s tomorrow, March 13. The start time is in fact 7p, and the location is still the firehouse in Little Silver.
But the event may not be quite as public as suggested by the Asbury Park Press.
Keith Rella, a spokesman for Assemblyman Mike Pantner, said the event is being held by the Democratic clubs of Fair Haven, Little Silver and Shrewsbury, and is not, as one might infer from the Press article, a town-hall style meeting.
Assemblyman Mike Panter thinks local government isn’t as responsive as it should be. So he’s holding a public forum for area residents to tee up the topic.
Want more details? Well, you won’t find them on Panter’s blog, which hasn’t been updated in two months.
We saw a notice of the meeting posted this afternoon on the Asbury Park Press website, which says it will be held at 7p at the Little Silver firehouse at 408 Prospect Avenue.
The Press doesn’t give a date, though, which is why we turned to Pantner’s blog and found only virtual cobwebs.
The accelerating shift of newspaper content from dead trees to the web will be topic A of a special program this Thursday evening (Nov. 30) at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft.
The event, titled “The Changing World of American Journalism,” will bring together an academic and four working journalists, each of whom will give a short presentation on newsgathering and publishing in the digital age. (See shameless plug, below.)
The event is free and open to the public. The audience will be encouraged to ask questions and raise concerns.
Particular emphasis, says event organizer Art Kamin, will be on what web-based journalism might mean to society, and yea, even democracy.
“Newspapers help make democracy work, but digital-age changes in newspapers are here and more are coming,” says Kamin. “This program will examine what the future may hold for journalism and how it will affect our livesespecially in New Jersey and in Monmouth County, where newspapers play a critical role serving as a government watchdog.”
Remember that house in Rumson we told you about earlier this month, the one for which the asking price had been slashed from $940,000 to $699,000 over the course of a year?
‘Little Silvered,’ author of The Jersey Shore Real Estate Bubble blog and source of our report, says that the house is now for rent as well as for sale. He’s been monitoring the house for the past year, and thinks the addition of this one and others to the for-rent rolls “is a clear indication how slow the real estate market currently is.”
Elsewhere, though, Little Silvered (who keeps his true identity a secret) says he believes asking prices in this region are down about 10 percent from the peak, which is a far cry from the 25-percent haircut the owners of the Rumson house in question have endured.
Any brokers, agents or sellers out there want to weigh in on Little Silvered’s take on the market?
Tom Labetti is a big fan of Verizons new FiOS service. Couldnt be a stronger advocate for the technology. Thinks its so good, in fact, that its going to all but annihilate the competition for both high-speed Internet access and cable, once it catches on.
And that scares the pixels out of him.
