Who is Reading This?

Writing is kind of a strange thing. You can write for yourself, in a journal, where nobody but you will ever see it or read it, or you can write for other people, in hopes that they will read what you write. I do both but I would much rather do that latter.

Ever since high school I've known I wanted to write. I got a degree in journalism and worked for several years as a reporter for a small town (population less than 5,000) daily (Monday through Friday) newspaper. I was getting paid to write but it wasn't easy. It was long hours and bad pay. We covered our town and neighboring towns and counties. We were everywhere with our notepads and cameras (we were our own photojournalists as well) covering everything from crime (very little) and trials (man is stabbed by screwdriver over parking space) to 4-H (hated the pig judging at the Arkansas Valley Fair) and high school volleyball (my sports reporting was TERRIBLE!). After my first few months at the newspaper I knew people many not have known my name but they knew where I worked. I once got pulled over for speeding on the way to a school board meeting and the state trooper didn't give me a ticket because he recognized my name from the newspaper.

At that time I tried not to think about people reading my stories. I knew the circulation of the newspaper but had no clue what people were really reading. Some days my byline appeared once and some days I'd have a couple stories in the newspaper. Every so often my story would appear on the front page, above the fold (and the obituaries, yes dying made front page news in this town) and sometimes I'd be back on page four, five or six. The only time I really knew if someone was reading one of my stories was when they complained. I was got corned in the Walmart by a school board member who was very angry over something I wrote.

I'm learning that blogging is a lot like writing for the newspaper, you never really know if or who is reading this blog. But that's okay with me because I'm writing and that's what really matters to me.