A farewell from the Editor

There’s two things that I know: Swedish pop duo Roxette is criminally-underrated, and West Virginia needs more journalists. 

Not opinion-commentators and influencers, we’ve got plenty of that. What we need are more reporters who can tell you what’s going on in the communities around you, and what your representatives are doing when they think you aren’t watching. And as hard as it can be sometimes, we need them to keep their opinions out of it because what we need are the facts. Once we have those, we can decide for ourselves how we feel about them. 

At least that’s how I see it, and it was with that driving principle in mind that Stephen and I created RealWV in December of 2022. And now a little over three years later, I couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve built. We haven’t always been perfect, and we made more than our fair share of mistakes along the way, but we created an honest-to-God independent news outlet, we kept you informed as fairly and as accurately as humanly possible, and we did it without charging you a dime. 

And we certainly didn’t do it all by ourselves. We’ve been lucky to assemble the team that we did: Autumn, Joe, Dakota, Jenny, Vanta, Anna, Star, Jonathan, Jeff and all the others I know I’m forgetting. As the editor, these people have made my life easy, and my job a joy. And as a fan of good writing, they have kept my well of creativity fulfilled. 

So it’s a little bittersweet that after more than three years and almost 10,000 stories, I’ve decided to step away from my day-to-day responsibilities as the editor of RealWV, and chase some different adventures. And in the world of West Virginia newspapers, there is no bigger adventure to chase than the Charleston Gazette-Mail. They’ve put together a really good editorial team there, and I’m excited to say that I’ve agreed to be a part of it. 

And if I’m leaving, I can’t think of a more appropriate day for me to make my epic exit than Friday the 13th – especially when it’s wrapped with Valentine’s Day. Just really seems like it’s supposed to work out that way. 

In trying to think how to sign off, I remember when Jon Stewart left The Daily Show (you know, before he came back), he didn’t want to say goodbye, so he said “I’m going to get a drink.” Well I don’t drink, so I’ll leave you with this:

If you’re looking for me, I’ll just be right down the street.

TTFN