Sacramento Press staff

Ben Ilfeld

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Age

31 years old

Gender

Male

Occupation

COO

Neighborhood

Poverty Ridge

Personal Tag Cloud

About Me

I am a co-founder of The Sacramento Press. I was born in Sacramento and have lived most of my life here.

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Most Recent Articles

Updating: Full arena coverage on The Sacramento Bee and Sactown Royalty and across the web

I'm going to keep this post going as a round-up of developing stories as I follow the arena deal implosion this afternoon. Our expanded coverage is here: http://www.sacramentopress.com/tag/arena Just a head's up for everyone - The Sacramento Bee is knocking it out of the park with Area (non) deal coverage today. They have a live chat, a reporter in NYC and an editorial that nails the issue dead-on (the owners need to go). Also, over at Sactown Royalty, the quick recap is on point. As always, the community there steals the show with amazing commentary. Like this gem from kromeace, "I suggest we show up at the arena (walk not park in their parking lot) and never go into the game. Instead w

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New Editor in Chief: Colleen Belcher

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

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10,000 Articles

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

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1,000 Unique authors

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

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Editorial: Today I support a strong mayor

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

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Most Recent Comments

Conversation about: Opinion: Five Reasons Why Kevin McCarty Does Not Deserve Your Vote

If there is any evidence of this it should be disclosed. Casey is not an investigator and we can only go so far. We would likely simply ask for affiliations to be disclosed and would only temporarily bring the article down until the affiliations are disclosed in the article. For me this whole thing is a sensitive subject. We have over 1,400 community contributors and the conflicts of interest are all over the place. Many are PR people and PIO's who are paid to write—and not by The Sacramento Press. We have developed both policies in our Terms of Use (which we have changed a couple of times based on our community's input) and new technical features like the disclosure field to be as transparent a community as possible.

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Conversation about: Occupy Creates Unoccupied Meeting Room

Awesome headline writing there.

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Conversation about: Small Market, Big Heart gives Kings fans the whole story - so far

I agree with both Laura and William here. It is a sort of twisted love story—but I'm all tangled up.

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Conversation about: Small Market, Big Heart gives Kings fans the whole story - so far

I loved this movie—particularly the early history of the team told by those who were part of it. Really beautiful that these guys just up and did this. It's a great contribution no matter the current controversy or current owners.

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Conversation about: Why We Can't Turn Affordable Housing Into Expendable Housing

this is all interesting, but what is Sacramento's available affordable housing situation compared to other cities in California? Any numbers about that?

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