Jay Turner and Ron Oster, Ernestine Bonn and Ken Pecus, Doug Myers and Hank Sullivan, Bill Walton and Tom Shess — these are just some of the people who make Balboa Park and its surrounding communities important places. Toni Atkins, Louise Torio, Bob Witty, Tom Hom, Joe Schloss, Craig Roberts, Karsten Gjemre, John Katsonas, Joan Seifried, Bob Gibbens, Dan Driscoll, John Drehner, Afton Miller and Jeff Rossman — these are only a few of the people who help make Mission Hills, Hillcrest, Marston Hills, University Heights, North Park, Burlingame and Golden Hill into gentrifying, livable, mostly improving neighborhoods, well-integrated compared with the suburbs.

They run museums and that allegedly world-famous zoo, feed us in restaurants, sell real estate and antiques, teach our children, preserve our canyons and do everything that makes the older parts of San Diego outside of Downtown into an urbane, sophisticated city where individuality and creativity are encouraged.

And so we are pleased to announce our acquisition of the North Park News from founders Tom and Phyllis Shess. A handsome 7-year-old community newspaper "Serving San Diego’s Premier Bungalow Communities," as the masthead declares, the North Park News deserves more attention than the Shesses have been able to give it since Tom Shess took over the editorship of San Diego Home/Garden.

We couldn’t resist. Half our staff lives in or near North Park, those aging blocks and mesas and hillsides of craftsman homes immediately to the north and east of Balboa Park. We have a good idea where North Park ends and Burlingame begins; we have a harder time defining where Hillcrest, Marston Hills and North Park meet. But we know we’re home and we prefer jogging these streets to any others.

The combination of the North Park News with our core product, the San Diego Metropolitan, which includes Lora Watters' well-received "Balboa Park" column, plus the 62-year-old Uptown Examiner, which we acquired 18 months ago from the Specht family, plus The Guide to Downtown San Diego creates a pretty irresistible ring around Balboa Park. At any one time, we should have about 39,896 current copies of our work in the hands of readers surrounding Balboa Park. And that’s before they pass along their copies to associates, spouses or friends. And that doesn’t include the additional 33,000 copies of the Metropolitan that circulate in Mission Valley, Kearny Mesa, La Jolla, Golden Triangle, Del Mar and points north and east.

Tom Shess and I will serve as co-publishers of NPN through a brief transition; then he’ll cut me loose. Metropolitan Editor Tim McClain will serve as editor-in-chief of the North Park News. Terence J. Burke, who won the 1998 Bulldog Award from the San Diego County Taxpayers Association for articles on Mid-City assessment districts in the Uptown Examiner, will serve as editor. Cyndi Meeves, director of public affairs at the Uptown Examiner, has been named associate publisher of the North Park News. Call us, please, at (619) 233-4060 if you have news, a good story idea, or if you require some inexpensive, cost-effective advertising to an upscale audience.

Our goal: To revive the corner of University and Mississippi sooner than 2025.