Jonathan Allen, Patch Staff

Bio: Jonathan grew up in West Ashley and attended Blessed Sacrament School and Bishop England High School. After graduating from the College of Charleston with a BA in Communications in 2002, Jonathan's first professional reporting job came with the Fort Mill Times in Fort Mill, S.C. in 2004. Over the following five years he became the senior reporter at the Times and won numerous reporting awards from the South Carolina Press Association for in-depth reporting, business reporting, and feature writing. He was also a part of the newsroom that earned a McClatchy President's Award for spot news reporting in 2007. He was promoted to Editor of the Times' sister paper the York and Clover Enquirer-Herald in 2009, where he earned additional SCPA awards for headline writing and photography, and the paper received SCPA's top honors in its size category, earning the General Excellence Award that year. Jonathan became a victim of shrinking newspaper budgets in October 2010 before joining Patch. Jonathan is married and lives in West Ashley. 

Your Beliefs: At Patch, we promise always to report the facts as objectively as possible and otherwise adhere to the principles of good journalism. However, we also acknowledge that true impartiality is impossible because human beings have beliefs. So in the spirit of simple honesty, our policy is to encourage our editors to reveal their beliefs to the extent they feel comfortable. This disclosure is not a license for you to inject your beliefs into stories or to dictate coverage according to them. In fact, the intent is the opposite: we hope that the knowledge that your beliefs are on the record will cause you to be ever mindful to write, report and edit in a fair, balanced way. And if you ever see evidence that we failed in this mission, please let us know.

Politics: How would you describe your political beliefs? Are you registered with a certain party?

I don't particularly like any political party. I find them all disappointing to some degree. I take a libertarian view of social issues and a progressive view on taxes and government regulation of business conduct, especially on environmental issues. I don't consider myself a party-line voter but I can't see myself voting Republican until the party decides it no longer needs to worry about what goes on in people's bedrooms and that all taxes are not inherently evil.

Religion: How religious would you consider yourself? (casual, observant, devout, non religious)

I was raised Catholic, I attended Catholic schools and mass every week, I was even an altar boy in middle school. I still consider myself culturally a Catholic, but I am somewhere between agnostic and atheist when it comes to religion. I feel that most religions have some very good ideas behind them, but I don't think any of them has cornered the market on the unknown.