Beginning Thoughts

I'm just going to add a few thoughts quickly so that this blog isn't entirely empty. First off, I just want to say that I'm bringing things to the table that I didn't even realize were good things. For example, I'm from a small town. I looked us up on Wikipedia so that you could check it out. Honestly, I was really surprised that we had a page and even more surprised at how much better the place looks on the Web than it does in person. I noticed that most of the details about why it's a terrible place to live were left out.

I come into this class with a bias against small towns, but I do understand the problem at hand. When I go home, I rarely read the local paper, and when I do, it's only to laugh at how bad it is. I looked up the Web site of our paper just to see what we might be dealing with when we look at these other small communities. It's improved quite a bit, but I can honestly say I'm still never going to use it for my news. So how could it be improved? Well, I don't know. But I'm hoping that we'll be able to find solutions this semester.

I know that bringing "from a small town" to the table isn't much, but I can do a few other things. I know some HTML and can use Joomla technology, although since I don't know what we'll be doing this semester, I really can't say that either of those will be of any use. I hope that I am able to develop those skills as the semester progresses. I've also interned at a local paper, so I understand some of the challenges that these papers may face. (However, I worked on the sports desk and so I avoided a lot of the problems regular reporters face.)

Two things that I definitely don't understand are PR and advertising. I'm excited to be working with students who specialize in these areas, and I'm hoping that I can learn something from them as we go along.


Sometimes I can get a little wordy, so I apologize in advance for any posts that get out-of-hand.


One last note ... I have a personal blog too, and I recently switched URLs so I have few readers. If you'd like to check it out, you can find it here. It's under my same account, just a different URL. (I'm linking to this blog on my personal one too!)