Myself as brand
June is certainly 'bustin out all over' with steamy hot days, which mean we've had the air on for several days straight. It has to be pretty hot for me to resort to AC all day but even the kids in Veeka's day school are kept in during the afternoons because of the temps.These days I'm going through boxes of old files from work, realizing that I'll not be doing stories again on most of these items. It's kind of bittersweet to go through years of documents over the Episcopal/Anglican breakup, which I chronicled as much - if not more - than any other US religion reporter for the secular media. Then there are the files on sexually abusive priests; also gay priests, gay bishops who hid the activities of their gay priests and sooo much material on church officials whom I - and many other reporters - knew were corrupt but we didn't quite have enough to go on for a story. Re-reading some of those files made me sad that so many bad people got away with ruining the careers of good priests who dared to speak out against them.It's so sad to see the evisceration of the religion beat. So many friends have fled to academia to teach or get doctorates or take refuge in fellowships that allow them to travel the globe. So few hires are happening these days and the stories are as important as ever. Many of these same bishops and cardinals remain in power. The Episcopalians and the Anglicans are still fighting it out in court.I've been working around the house a bit, painting the stone border around the crape myrtle in the back yard. Pictured is Veeka posing atop the stones which took forever to get done. The week I applied the primer was when there was a thunderstorm every afternoon mean that my paint job would get wiped out. Am working on other stuff; just started a "social media boot camp" where you learn how to analyze traffic and demographics on various web sites. Today was my first day and it was sure interesting hearing the lecturers say you can't just have a presence on the web; you need to stand out. More sobering for my occupation; social media such as Twitter and Facebook have leveled the information-sharing play field that journalists once owned. Now everyone can and does provide information. Whether or not it's accurate is another thing altogether but the presence of so many citizen-journalists has decimated the ranks of the professionals.I tried measuring how many people read this site and the number was so low, the counting mechanism showed nothing. Hmmm - I have signed onto a different web site host so hopefully within a new months I'll have a refurbished site that I'll have a hand in designing. Guess I'll recreate myself as a brand, right?