Thanks - a Million!

 

I knew it was getting close. Some time in January I looked, and it was over nine hundred seventy-five thousand. And this morning, I looked again, and it was over a million.  A million page-views on this blog, that is. A million of anything is a lot, and I’m elated to have reached that milepost here.

 

Thank you.

 

I started this blog in ’09, just as a way to chronicle things I was thinking about. I had no delusions that anything would ever go viral. It was just a way to express myself, without any editorial oversight. I’m told that blogs have become passé now. I don’t care. I love to write, and I have really enjoyed blogging here.

 

I haven’t been very faithful to this blog lately. Three posts in December – one, early in the month, which generated a LOT of hits, was when I posted about the late Paulie Heenan, and how we really need to rethink how we deal with cops who take someone’s life. And, this is the first post of 2015.

 

I have been busy; busier than I’d like to be, in fact, now that I’ve passed the golden age of 65. As a self-employed writer, I’ve whittled my workload down to two gigs. My main job, the one that’s taken a great deal of time the past several months, is redeveloping and reinvigorating a website I was commissioned to create in 2009 by the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association Foundation.

 

You’re welcome to visit this site, which is now called WBA Newsroom. Crawl around it and find all sorts of things useful mainly to working broadcast news people in Wisconsin – reporters, photographers, news managers. It has quick links to Wisconsin laws specific to gathering news in the Badger State; how to pronounce unusual Wisconsin place-names like Shawano and Oconomowoc; how our state’s Open Meetings and Open Records laws work, as relates to the news media; and all sorts of (I hope) other cool stuff.

 

Ever since the great recession in ’08, a lot of veteran news people have had to find other work (something I know more than a little bit about), and the Broadcasters’ Association was wise to realize that since so many of us long-timers were gone from newsrooms, and not around to mentor the younger folks, an online resource might be just the ticket to help fill that void.

 

I’m also in charge of the social media platforms for the WBA Newsroom site.  You’re welcome to search “WBA Newsroom” on Facebook and “like” us there; and, if you wish, you can follow us on Twitter, where you’ll find us at @WBANewsroom.  I try to showcase some of the great work being done by Wisconsin broadcast newsrooms via the Facebook page and Twitter account.

 

I’m also starting my sixth year as the Wisconsin producer for Public News Service. You can find an archive of the news stories I’ve produced at this link. We try to find important stories the “mainstream media” sometimes overlooks, and draw attention to them via our distribution network of hundreds of Wisconsin radio and TV stations and newspapers.

 

But now, things have calmed down a bit, and I’m going to find time to unleash some snarky rants on this blog again.

 

Thanks for all your “clicks” over the years – thanks more than a million, as a matter of fact – and I’m looking forward to getting back in the habit of speaking my mind here.