It seemed the perfect juncture in my life to start a blog. I have resisted for quite some time because I could never think of a name. When this particular name of “Double Nuggets” made my daughter “lol,” I knew I should run with it. Plus, I’ve always been the property of some other entity who was paying me to write, so having a blog seemed a bit of an overkill. In this case, for the 
last four, going on five, years I have been the property of The Other Paper. A local alt-weekly. The funnest place to work. And some of the best writing around town.
It was a pleasure to work there. And then…
Many of you have witnessed the annihilation of print media. To be fair, it actually started many years ago. Long before Internet, there was television and radio. And newspapers found themselves competing with nightly news broadcasts and real, live anchors. But papers somehow found a gap to fill in every day consumer life, whether it was a morning paper or an evening one; a weekly or a daily or a monthly; or whether it was metro or suburban or rural. Papers had a home.
And then the Internet came along. And then Facebook. And then “the Twitter,” as my parents call it. And the cost of paper went up. And then a devastating economic downturn that sent businesses into financial tailspins. The carnage of that economic wreck laid to rest many bodies, one of which was the advertising-heavy print industry. Businesses struggling to get by needed the biggest advertising bang for the buck—and print was hardly one of them.
I survived the downturn, sticking around while others were laid off. It was like being on the Titanic and sitting safely in a lifeboat while the others went down with the ship.
A travesty to see good people lost at sea.
It soon became clear that new opportunities would have to be examined, pursued even, in order to survive. There was an 8-year-old in the lifeboat with me and she needed me to find a safe harbor. Fast. And without regret or emotion.
And so here I am. Leaving the home I’ve loved for four years and moving on to the corporate world where the future of the paper industry, and all industries, lies in wait: social media. I will be clicking away during the day on the various outlets trying to help you understand through Tweets and likes and check-in’s why my company is a good choice, among other things.
I’m excited to be at a place where I get to hone my skills, where I get compensated adequately for what I bring to the table and where I can grow as a person and a professional.
But it is bittersweet.
I leave behind me a beautiful career in what was a beautiful medium: the newspaper. The crisp, dirty pages as they crumpled in my grandfather’s big rocking chair were comforting to me as a child. My grandfather would take one section to his chair; my grandmother would take the other to her couch. I would play quietly in between them as I watched him slowly pore over the Sports section while she read the front page with the huge headlines and the giant photos.
“Pappy!” she’d holler at him a short time later, even though he was only a few feet away, “let me see the Sports section.”
She was a huge baseball fan.
Between the two of them they would pass around the pieces and parts of it, look at it again, cut ads out, clip coupons, mark calendars, complete the crossword. I would find a lost portion in the bathroom, or the bedroom or the basement and I would pore over it, too. But I only understood the comics. And sometimes not even those.
So as a middle school child, I created my own newspaper. The eye catching headline was “Ohio State fat baby born!” And next to it, a hand-drawn fat baby. I had ads and personals and secondary news stories and obituaries. I sold 10 copies of it to my 12-year-old friends.
There was a permanency to it all. The paper will never go away. Because, really, what could ever replace it?
There is a great ache and a new excitement that have made their homes in the pit of my stomach. I’m thrilled for a new beginning that will take me new places. I mourn the loss of something that was beautiful. If only for a short time. And in both, I welcome the newest iteration of myself in my career and here, in the blogger’s world.
I hope you’ll be kind to me. I hope you’ll show me the ropes. I hope you’ll point out when I’m wrong. And I hope you feel welcomed enough to share your thoughts with me. I love comments. And likes. And re-tweet’s. Perhaps they are the things I love the most. Because the biggest difference between the paper and the Internet is our ability to share what we love. Or like. Or hate. Faster and with personal commentary. And when it comes to human communication, it’s the connecting that’s most important. From the one way conversation of paper, to the multidimensional conversation of social media.
Goodbye; Hello.
Posted by sg1123 | Filed under On Life Changes
