Publishing Mondays, Weekend Santa Cruz is a weekly online magazine dedicated to arts, entertainment and fun in Santa Cruz County. Through a mix of features and easy-to-read listings, Weekend Santa Cruz aims to be the one stop that helps locals and visitors plan their time off and answer the question, “Hey, what are you doing this weekend?”

Our Story

Weekend Santa Cruz began after an online search of things to do around town one weekend proved challenging. Sites had difficult navigations, separated calendars or a lack of updating. If the content was there, the attention to an online audience was not. Frustration quickly turned to inspiration. With experience in print journalism and Web building, we figured why not create what we were looking for.

Our Staff

Jennifer K Mahal, Editor/Publisher
After college, Jennifer K Mahal went on summer vacation to Key West, Fla. She returned to California two and half years later a journalist. Between covering missile defense testing as a politics reporter and Cuban folk artists as a features editor for the Key West Citizen, she found her calling. Ms. Mahal has also designed papers for Times Community News (part of the Los Angeles Times Group), city edited the Huntington Beach Independent, talked with painters, poets and jazz singers as features editor for the Newport Beach Daily Pilot and has written about topics as diverse as equestrian culture and mariachi for the San Diego Union-Tribune. She served as publicist for the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa from 2004 to January 2007, helping them open their new concert hall. Reach Jennifer at editor@weekendsantacruz.com or (831) 440-8607.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Technical Advisor
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the coeditor of four collections published by the MIT Press: with Nick Montfort, The New Media Reader (2003); with Pat Harrigan, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004), Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), and Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009). His latest book, Expressive Processing, will be published September 2009.