Becoming a believer

I am so anti-blog. But here I am, sitting in my dungeon-like office, when I should be doing work; instead I am defying one of the founding pillars of my definition of a journalist:

Thou Shalt Not Participate In Endeavors That Threaten Your Industry.

There was a time before the word “blog” became so widely known, when it was thought that the unassuming four letter word would be the nail in the coffin of the newspaper industry in which my working career got its start.

I became concerned, as blogs began sprouting up everywhere, seemingly taking over the spaces in people’s minds where my words used to be. My words: the words of a fledgling newspaper reporter who knew less about life than she wrote about everyday. Less about taxes, politics, small towns, large cities and the people that became sources and solutions to every story I wrote. Blogs became the way people expressed emotions, shared secrets they couldn’t bare to reveal face to face, and pondered questions that the mainstream and often slanted media had no grasp on.

But now, as I sit at my squeaky chair in a decaying building in the bad neighborhood in the best city in the world, my perspective has changed. I am no longer the innocent and naïve newspaper reporter that left Iowa and Maine with dreams unfulfilled. I am the person who has made her biggest dream come true, living and working in New York City, but still has not experienced that elusive word “fulfillment.” To be completely cliché, it is all about the journey, I suppose.

I believe in blogs now for a number of reasons, although I still am still not public in my support. As a writer, I believe in the blog as my form of free therapy and a way to free myself from creative blocks. As a journalist, I believe in the blog as a tool that will hopefully help my industry relate to a generation of computer-addicted, technologically obsessed teens. As a reader, I believe in the blog to provide a feeling of insight, beyond any comparable form of the written word.

In a word, a blog is truth. And I suppose it’s about time I started telling it.

“Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
-Flannery O'Connor

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”
-Aldous Leonard Huxley, British writer