On Thanksgiving.. very good advice..

If you are from Belleville why do you read a Millburn-Short Hills website? By the way, Obama has always been extremely critical of Bush (not that I am a giant Bush fan) .I just find his blame game politics disgusting and non-Presidential. Clinton showed a lot more Presidential class until.. well..you know.

Not far from other shadowy acronymic organizations.

Perhaps, in addition to displaying a commenter's name, each comment could display the town where they live. It would also be nice, as others have indicated, if each article had a tag indicating whether it was a "local" or "regional" article.

Mary, is there any resource for visitors (non-Patch folk) to be able to know what the "topology" of a story's posting is? - for example, I have noticed the same stories are often posted to many, many Patch sites but the responses to a story in one area are not visible to the readers in another area. Is there any method to the madness, so to speak?

Also, I think that Patch should disclose more about how their system works, its design goals, and also that Patch staff should disclose where they acually live (just the town is fine) - I don't have a problem with Patch editors working in several editor positions or far away from where they edit, (Almost anything that makes web work viable for people economically in these tough economic times is good) but I do think they should disclose the basic facts - and be able to disclose an alternative contact method.. Also it bothers me the way that their contact methods (including a "smart phone" which AOL evidently pays for) feeds wholly via Patch which is a red flag for me- re privacy..

I hope I don't have to go into a lengthy explanation of the issue. People often go to the media in attempts to resolve local issues, so its scary when access to those (local or not) reporters is filtered and their locations, even, potentially tracked.

Also Google AOL and censorship.

I think that's a great idea. I'll send a note to the product people. In the meantime, maybe there's a way that we can do that within the body of the article.