There comes a time in all our lives for a reckoning.
I’m a dinosaur in so many ways.
As a newspaperman who went to work right out of high school, reporting and shooting photos for The Roanoke Times in Southwestern Virginia, I had already been writing news stories and having photos published in other papers while still in high school.
More than a half-century later — after working at a newspaper in Illinois before moving on to spend 23 years operating out of Washington, DC — I am back int he Blue Ridge Mountains.
At 68, I’m still a newspaperman at heart and work for BH Media as a contract writer and photographer. I’m also an old-timer at the Internet, owning and operating the oldest political news web site — Capitol Hill Blue — as well as a web hosting operation and several other web-based publications.
This web site was one of my first and has been ignored in recent years as I concentrated on other things.
No more. It is time to remember that , as Finley Peter Dunne wrote as Mr. Dooley, “it is the role of a newspaperman to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
How? Not sure yet but I’ve removed advertising from DougThompson.Com and will revamp it into a personal web site with no commercial intent. In part, I want to have fun, which is hard to do in today’s often-toxic political and news environment but is, I believe, still possible.
I wrote this in the early morning hours of March 15, 2016. I will spend the next two weeks re configuring this web site into something that i hope will be both fun and interesting.
The ride starts on April 1 — April Fool’s Day. Keep checking back as we approach the kickoff.
Let the madness beging.