Not To Be Confused With Journalism

I started writing this blog just a few months after I came home from the Emory East rehab center in Snellville, following my near-death experience at the DeKalb Medical ICU. I did not really know what a blog was. I thought finding out might focus my attention occasionally against the fog of recovery from illness. Additionally, I needed to exercise my brain and see if any of it still worked, the same way physical therapy retrained my body and tested its limits.

Last month, I made my first penny off the blog. Three of them, in fact. I have not yet received payment, but I am told it has been credited to my account. There has never been any money in writing. I’ve known that a long time. That is why I have worked in other fields and was lucky to find things I could do that earned me an acceptable living and were interesting enough to keep my compass pointed to going to work every day. As a very young person, I wanted to be a journalist and was one for long enough to know to find another road that needed taking and to never look back. Many of my blog postings discuss current events, mostly politics, a lifelong interest. I do not confuse my blog postings with journalism. Certainly I do not put in the long hours of drudgery, drive time, travel, sleeping in hotels away from home, eating bad food on the road, a drink or two. Even the big stars of TV journalism are on the air morning, noon, and night. No wonder so many of the things they have to say are numb-skulled. At least they are paid well. I do not have any carefully cultivated and guarded sources. I use generally available information and my own experiences and knowledge to have a little fun writing, maybe express something in a way interesting enough to make a reader want to come back again.

I have developed a small but loyal readership, for which I am humbled and grateful. Sometimes I take a great notion to try to come up with ways of attracting more readers. I have a small mailing list, but the statistics indicate a very high rate of logons from my mailings. When I don’t write anything, people don’t read it. Thank you, Yogi Berra. I could write more often or concentrate on more subjects of local interest. I could try to hitch a ride with a bigger, more widely read blog.

One guy who did not like something I had written said I should stick to things I know something about. Not really bad advice. I have owned rental property for the past 20 years, and I know a lot about that and the things that go along with it, like fixing toilets. I also am highly trained and experienced in the science and technology that makes your telephones work, officially known as telephony. Sometimes I like to pronounce it tell-a-phony. I specialized in multiplexers and Digital Access Cross-connect Systems. Somehow I doubt blogs about these subjects would make you beg for more? I have received several requests to “Please remove my name from your mailing list.” Easier done than said. The biggest criticism I get is, “So what’s your point?” If you think you saw something out of the corner of your eye, maybe that was it.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter