Archive for February, 2009
Happy Birthday and a Happy New Medium
Tomorrow I turn 35 years old. For my birthday, Julie got me this blog. I don’t really know how I’m going to use it yet, but I do recognize it is more than just a gift. In some way that I don’t yet understand, this blog is my future.
Allow me to explain…
I am a newspaperman. Or was. My transition has been slow. It started in 2004, while a freeleance reporter for a weekly newspaper. In my spare time, I built my first blog by fooling around with Dreamweaver and teaching myself a little HTML. It was a labor of love and one of the great pleasures of my career as a writer. It helped me get a job with a daily newspaper in Ashland, Oregon.
In my three-year tenure with the Daily Tidings, our print audience shrunk at roughly the same rate as our web audience grew. I actually saw the printing presses moved out and loaded onto a flatbed truck on one particualry poignant day at the office.
There, and at my next gig as a night editor of a daily in southern Vermont, I literally witnessed the newspaper business crumble around me. Then one day about six months ago I saw an ad on Craigslist. A star-up news website was looking to set up shop in my hometown and needed an experienced editor to help build a news operation.
After months of dreaming and creating My02818.com, we are about a month away from going live. At least one result of our efforts is that I can no longer, in good conscience, call myself a newspaperman, a title I hold in the highest regards.
Sad as that makes me, I’m even more excited for journalism’s future on the internet. Newspapermen (and newspaperwomen) aren’t becoming extinct, afterall. Only the paper. Communities, concerned citizens and society in general will still need news. It’s just the paper we don’t need anymore. I am now, more simply, a newsman.
Because I will literally be navigating new online territory when it comes to the community journalism model, I might just use this blog to chart my course. Community journalism is an interesting animal in and of itself, and it is one of great pleasures of my life to get to see how it works through the medium of the internet.
Bob Plain