PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM 33 readers. “Our biggest post ever was when Steph Curry was going to be at Safeway,” she says of the Golden State Warriors star’s 2024 promotional appearance in Menlo Park. “That got 11,000 views.” Linda keeps up the website and sends out daily email digests with only one paid staffer—the IT guy. Everything else is the work of her small team of volunteer contributors and of Linda herself. As many a media organization has discovered, keeping a crew of unpaid “citizen journalists” engaged and productive is no mean feat. Neither is replenishing their ranks when they drift away. “People raise their hands, and that leads to more people,” she says simply, adding that she doesn’t think she’s had a volunteer yet who didn’t have a connection to some other InMenlo contributor. Anyone who subscribes to InMenlo’s emails might wonder if Linda ever takes a day off. The in 2010, she made the decision to keep InMenlo going. “I could make my way around Menlo Park and be a journalist, not a widow,” she says of that first difficult year. “It was something I could do, and something that I liked doing.” While Chris created what’s widely considered to be one of the very first blogs (gulker.com), Linda’s journalism career was more traditional: writing and editing for newspapers and magazines, then transitioning to marketing. Among the suite of skills Linda’s picked up over the years, her ability to connect with people just might be the glue that holds InMenlo together. As an avid walker and restaurant patron, she’s always out and about, talking to people. “I get a decent amount of tips,” Linda says. Mostly, they come from InMenlo answer is: not really. “The good news about InMenlo is that none of my posts are lengthy,” she says modestly. On a recent day, Linda had two interviews that still needed to be written up, and plenty of other newsy items in the works. The time demand varies, but her commitment to posting items seven days a week does not. Even on vacation, she says she can always carve out a few hours to work on it. Linda’s love of the news business dates back to MenloAtherton High School. She learned from a “terrific journalism teacher” and worked on the yearbook staff, then continued taking journalism classes while majoring in history at UCLA. One of her professors got Linda a job interview at the LA Times with “a fabulous crusty old editor” who hired her on the spot for an entry level job on the newsroom’s copy desk. “I guess he thought I could “My favorite story about Linda is when she was on vacation in New Zealand and there was an earthquake that blocked the road to exit the town. After a few days, they got out by boat. This never stopped her from posting InMenlo stories every day she was there.” — ROBB MOST, PHOTOGRAPHER AND INMENLO CONTRIBUTOR PHOTOGRAPHY: ROBB MOST ABOVE: Robb Most and Linda Hubbard tour the world’s largest camera at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in 2022 for an InMenlo story.
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