Goodbye Forever, For Now

I started this web site about three-and-a-half years ago, and now it may be time to end it, for good.  Maybe.  I’m going to take some of the next four or six months to figure it out, and in that time, I will not be writing news for it.

I’m tired, to be fully honest.  This past semester at Montgomery College—my full-time job as a composition and journalism professor—was a long one.  I had to steal small pieces of time from many other parts of my life to write the HeraldTrib, this semester especially, and it showed in spotty, lackluster coverage, I thought. 

The blog started as a way to get a sabbatical from my teaching job.  The technology was new, and free, and Buckingham was not covered by the local papers, and the local papers were neither easily nor freely delivered to Buckingham, so I started a news site just for us.  I wanted it to be a chance, too, for me to try to tell news in a different way, more creatively.  And in the process, I was preparing my sabbatical application. 

Well, the sabbatical came, and the coverage was pretty good.  I picked up readers, and I think I have a good reputation in the county for even-handed coverage of the news.  The readership has never gotten to what I was hoping for, but the readers I have are some of the most dedicated—taking time out of their busy days to read new posts within minutes and hours.

I’ve been featured in a Washington Post story and on a Knight Foundation web site for citizen journalism.  Working on the HeraldTrib gave me the opportunity to work with the Connection Newspapers out of Fairfax County, and most recently I was a guest on WAMU’s Kojo Naamdi Show. 

But one particular feather in the cap eluded me.

About a year ago one of my sisters asked me what my plans for the web site were.  I told her how I felt like I was on the cusp of one trend in journalism: hyper-local coverage.  Newspapers all over the nation have carved niches out of their communities, given laptops to reporters, and told them to make an office out of their cars, their houses, their local coffee shops and bookstores.  Naples (Florida) Daily is one that has done this more than others, with dozens of reporters covering news with laptops and cell phones.  Just like me.

So I told my sister I did not want to miss whatever business opportunity might be out there.  I wanted to keep my site updated and good enough that I would be ready for whatever might come my way. 

“My business plan,” I said, only half-joking, and I can quote because I told many people this, “is for the Washington Post to buy me out or hire me.”

It was not much of a business plan, but I knew from a conference I attended in 2007 that the Post was thinking of people like me.  They had already created the hyper-local, online Loudoun Extra.  And from what people at that conference said, they were looking elsewhere.  I wanted to be big enough and good enough that they would have to see me when they looked. 

Over a number of months in the fall of 2008 and winter of 2009, I had been thinking that I really should call the Post and tell them that if they were looking, so was I, and could we meet, when last spring, they called me and said, “We’re looking.  Can we meet?”  They talked to everyone in the Arlington journalism community from what I could tell, testing the waters for an online run at hyper-local journalism. 

After three interviews, it looked like my business plan, as far-fetched as it was, actually was going to work.  I thought I would not be heading back to Montgomery College in September. I would be the face (God help the viewers) of the new arlington.washingtonpost.com site.  However, the Post decided to go local in a different way and would not need me, as it turned out. 

I was disappointed to be sure, and going back to Montgomery College in September was tough, but I hold no hard feelings toward the Post (and if you change your minds, feel free to call!). 

So that business plan is no good anymore; I must find a new one.  That’s part of what I plan to do this winter and spring.  I’ll be looking at articulating a new plan, one that I can make clear to myself, my family, my readers and potential investors and advertisers. 

It might be that I cannot balance the three major elements of my life: family, work and the HeraldTrib.  It might be that I think up an idea that I would rather pursue.  It might be that I just enjoy the extra free time so much, nothing could peel me away from the Wii.  Right now, that last option seems most likely, but I always feel this way in December, and by mid-January, once my batteries are recharged, I feel like I can do everything. 

So thank you for reading, but it’s goodbye forever, for now.