I have been writing at The BG News for two and a half years now, and it has become my custom to write a “What I did over summer vacation” column at the start of each new school year. So without further ado…
This summer, I put myself on a self-imposed news hiatus.
I generally follow the news pretty thoroughly, because I am a political junkie, but by late last semester I felt really burned out on the news. So I made a conscious decision to watch, or read, as little news as possible over the summer.
Of course, there are always those stories that you catch bits and pieces of whether you want to or not [like the George Zimmerman case for instance], but I tried really hard to avoid it.
To be honest [and I never would have believed this before this summer], I didn’t really miss the news all that much. I stayed busy, instead, trying to get my house ready for my new son who is scheduled to arrive in September.
I also had a period of rediscovery of sorts.
For one, I rediscovered my love for bluegrass music.
I played and sang bluegrass for a living for 10 years [in what sometimes seems like another life now] in a band with my older brother before getting married and deciding to return to school. Since quitting that career seven years ago, I had seldom listened to the music that consumed my life for so long. Over the summer, however, my brother and I started an internet radio show, playing bluegrass music and doing in-depth interviews with bluegrass artists [check out the Route 23 Radio Show on Facebook if you’re interested].
I also rediscovered my love of Stephen King books. At one point in that previous life, I read King’s books almost exclusively, but hadn’t read one in some time before the summer. To replace my news watching over the summer I re-read “The Stand,” “It,” “Different Seasons” and “The Green Mile.”
I also spent a lot of time this summer trying to think of ways to spice up the Forum section this year.
That was a hard task, because I love what we have been doing in the Forum section over the last couple of years, yet the eternal optimist in me believes that anything can be made better with a little effort.
So there are a few things I want to try to do this year a little different with our little, opinionated, section of The BG News.
One of those is here on the page right now. Every Friday I want to do a little sidebar called “Three Things to Make You Look Smart Next Week.”
This will be a [sometimes] humorous way to point out a few things that we [here at the Forum page] think you should be aware of in the week ahead.
I also hope to increase Forum’s online presence. While The BG News has an award winning website, Forum tends to be something most people only look for in the print edition; I hope to change that.
One way we will attempt to do that is have original content that will appear online only. Two of our columnists, Cassie Sullivan [who I’m proud to say is the Assistant Forum Editor] and Meagan Ward [who used to write for us and is returning this semester] will both write a column every week for Monday, but will alternate printing on Mondays.
That means that every Monday one of these columns will be printed, while the other will be available exclusively online. My hope is that you will get on The BG News website every Monday to see what these very talented writers have to say.
I also hope that we can do more “Opposing Opinions” pieces, which is when we have two columnists who have differing opinions on a given topic, print their points of view side-by-side. This allows for both viewpoints of the topic to be out there, so you, the reader, are informed and can decide who’s right for yourself.
Summer has come and gone, and school is back in session. We all have to find our niche in dealing with the new year, and while I hope your summer was good I hope even more that your fall semester will be great.
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