Shifting a column from one web site to another is the same as sloshing 10 gallons of alphabet soup and trying to not spill a single drop. It is the nature of journalism today. One site contracts, another expands, or starts up. But the main trouble with journalism today is that everyone with a computer is a reporter and anyone with a cell phone is a photographer.
The switch also involves discerning the mind of a new editor as well as figuring a fresh audience. What will play in one zip code may not be fodder in another. Who was reading the old tactile print product was pretty much a given. But the Internet’s reach is far and wide – and anonymous – a transplant in Dubuque or an ex-pat in Quebec or a kid with an I-pad on the steps of a community college somewhere in Palookaville. But geezers have been around so long that the name might be familiar. If not, here’s the poop sheet.
Frank A. DeFilippo
Josh Kurtz called just as my previous gig was ending, and here I am, splashing in the deep end of the talent pool with Josh, Bill Zorzi and Bruce DePuyt and whoever else dives in along the way. Journalism is a form of locomotion – it gets you from here to there.
I left college many years ago with a degree in English and a portable typewriter. Eight years later I was on Air Force One, thrilled but terrified to be in the company of the celebrity reporters of the day – Dan Rather, Max Frankel, Merriman Smith and Frank Reynolds, among them, along with the big guy in the back of the plane, President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
