Thursday, January 5, 2012

Why I stopped blogging

Hello friends. Some of you have never seen this version of my blog, which I created in July of 2009 when I just couldn't stop blabbing about every damn thing that popped into my head. I could use this space for anything I wanted, as opposed to my Daily Herald blog, which I used for ... well, anything I wanted, as it turned out.

But this blog has been dormant for just a little over two years, and my Daily Herald blog hasn't been updated since July of 2011.

In fact, the Daily Herald blog won't be updated ever again.

Last year brought a lot of changes to my job; our web staff was decimated by layoffs, which meant that all of us on the copy desk had to learn how to manage dailyherald.com. That was a harder thing than I ever imagined it would be, it consumed a lot of my time, and it added to my already epic levels of worry and stress. So blogging took a backseat.

Not long after that, we learned that our website would no longer be completely free. Parts of dailyherald.com would become "Premium Content," meaning that you couldn't even look at it without a subscription. All of the DH's blogs would fall under that label, and I could not, in good conscience, ask anyone to pay for the "privilege" of reading my blog. I barely see any movies, I don't even have cable anymore, and I'm at work when most of you are out there consuming pop culture; any reactions or insight I could provide on my blog would be coming well after the fact -- which is fine, if you're reading it here, on this free site, that doesn't pay me.

But if I'm going to write something that represents the third-largest newspaper in the state, it should be current and unfettered. My DH blog was neither of those things. So I stopped writing it.

Someone at the Herald finally noticed as much, and I decided right then and there to put it out of its misery. The worst part of it is that I'm now in the market for a new computer -- I had convinced TPTB at work to give me a company laptop early in 2011, so I could update my blog "as news happened." I actually used the laptop for that purpose for about, oh, two months. (Though I did use it to work on my actual job from home on more than a few occasions.)

Once I decided to kill the blog, I could no longer keep up the charade of needing a company laptop. (I'm typing this entry on my parents' computer. And yes, I'm also doing laundry for free in the middle of the night.) Of course, now that I'm free of the shackles of my Daily Herald blog, I feel like I can start writing again -- but now I have no computer of my own to write with. Hopefully, that will change soon.

So that's why I haven't written anything aside from tweets and FB posts since July. (Some of you probably think that's more than enough.) I plan on seeing enough movies in the next month or so to make a halfway decent Top Ten list for 2011, so maybe that will bring you back here soon.

Hope to see you then.

1 comment:

  1. You can a get decent computer at Microcenter in Westmont for around $200. I could also build you one, heh-heh.

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