Sit down with Linda Hubbard, and you’ll be struck by how quickly it feels like you’re talking to an old friend. Her friendly tone infuses InMenlo, the hyper-local community news blog she’s been running since 2010. Covering the Midpeninsula communities of Menlo Park, Atherton, Portola Valley and Woodside, it’s the online equivalent of a chatty, well-informed neighbor giving you the scoop on all those little things that make your hometown unique. Which house has the best Halloween decorations? Is there a good event to take the kids to this weekend? And did you hear about the married couple who are both 100 years old? InMenlo is here for you.
Daily emails from InMenlo tend to have a handful of short items. The tone is light—you won’t find stories about politics or crime—but the website’s origin story is a little less rosy. InMenlo started as a passion project born of necessity.
Though she’s a longtime journalist, Linda wasn’t the founder of InMenlo, which launched in 2009. That honor goes to Linda’s late husband Chris Gulker. After a terminal brain cancer diagnosis derailed his high-profile career in photojournalism and tech, Chris wanted to do something that accommodated his newly limited mobility. He launched the platform with his good friend Scott Loftesness. Linda’s involvement was modest at first—she still had a day job—but after Chris died 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 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 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 Menlo-Atherton 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 handle it,” Linda says. By assisting the reporters and witnessing their conversations with that old editor, she learned what it meant to be a journalist. “The cool thing about journalism is that I have met so many interesting people,” she says.
After college, Linda stayed in Southern California, eventually leaving the LA Times for Modern Maturity (now called AARP The Magazine). When Chris got a job offer from San Francisco Examiner publisher Will Hearst in 1990, Linda says she jumped at the chance to move back to the Peninsula. “I was happy to be home.” The publisher of the Palo Alto-based Peninsula Times Tribune—a former boss and friend from the LA Times—offered Linda a job heading up the marketing department. It was her first foray into the business side of news, and led to roles with a string of small marketing companies after the struggling newspaper finally folded in 1993.
When InMenlo turned 12 in 2021, the Menlo Park City Council took notice, issuing a proclamation declaring Linda a beloved local institution “as an ever-present and studious chronicler of the community.” It lauded her many roles, including editor, reporter and occasional photographer, and praised her “commitment to providing a reliable, impartial and detailed news source during a period when many communities have experienced the demise of local news sources.” InMenlo is studiously apolitical—not for lack of interest in local politics, Linda says, but because she doesn’t have the resources to cover it properly.
Linda has a tendency to deflect attention from herself by talking warmly about her late husband’s many accomplishments, and equally warmly about her second husband, Dennis Nugent, and the life they’ve built together. Dennis is one of Linda’s many connections from her Menlo Park school days. The two shared mutual friends from elementary school and got to know each other while at Menlo-Atherton. After reconnecting decades later, they proudly display photos of their blended family in their cozy home.
As for what’s next for InMenlo? More of the same, as far as Linda is concerned. She has no plans to retire from this labor of love. “InMenlo evolves along with the people who contribute to it,” Linda says, admitting that “It feels good to give something back to the community.”
Especially a community that she clearly adores.