I drank a lot of gin that night

Browsing through some of my old writing, I found this post that I wrote while on the East side of the state and never finished, revised, or posted. So let's--here, now--do one of those things:

I'm writing to you today from the wilds of Kenniwick, at a meeting of the WNPA, the Washington Newspapers Publishing Association, where I am in the process of learning about how to adapt to a changing publication focus, audience, and technology.

The gist of the meeting I'm in now (entitled: Web sites: Static, Active, Boring?) is that websites--specifically, here, the community newspapers' websites; perhaps even more specifically, my community paper's website--need to be interactive and reflect the community to which it belongs. It needs constantly changing content, a consistent voice, and the ability for the township's citizens to increase their involvement in what gets reported and how.

I read the USA Today this morning, followed by a couple chapters of Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, sitting out by the foot deep pool situated octagonal, listening to Old Crow Medicine Show. You know which was more interesting? Exactly. You know why? 'Cause Lester had soul, and you'd be hard pressed to find someone who could compare in any journalistic endeavor, let alone at the USA today.

What I'm getting at--haphazardly, interrupted as I've been by roundtables, awards, and trappings of power--is that any paper, every paper, is better when you give it all you've got, when you believe in what you do< and say, when you want to (and when you can) be artistically satisfied, personally vindicated, and emotionally fulfilled. That's not just journalism, that's anything. Master craftsmen are those who have dedicated their lives to perfection, to their art, to themselves, to their audience. They leave nothing behind.

That's the benchmark. That's high-water. It's the acme, the apogee, the zenith. It's the goal towards which we strive. What I'm slowly learning here is that the first step towards that goal is to post dynamic content to your webpage to drive up page views and better serve the ad reps. The devil, as ever, is in the details.