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Got a legacy of sorts, but no willing heirs

By Micheal Boddy
Posted Monday, April 21, 2008

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I guess it's natural, for humans at least, to want to leave something that goes on after they're gone.

So what happens when what you're investing your life in is actually nothing but kilobytes in cyberspace? Not exactly what I'd call leaving a big footprint behind, to be found in the future.

Lately I've been wondering what will happen to The Weekly Journal after Susan and I are no longer able to publish it. Right now there is no staff waiting in the wings to make it their own, because there is no staff.

Another problem is, most publications are reflections of the folks who produce them. Susan and I have been very lucky. A good portion of our early journalism careers was spent at newspapers that believed in producing the best product possible, where management was brave enough to give their staffs the freedom to learn and grow so they could do just that.

Journalism today has become so formulaic that I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe didn't soon put out a program that would take a dozen or so facts and create a story, with the "writer" having to only make a few selections, like whether it's a news, feature, or sports story. And it wouldn't be much of a leap with almost all written journalism in the U.S. being edited (by humans at the moment) using the Associated Press Stylebook. It's a vampiric publication created by insane wannabe writers to suck the life and creativity out of real writers, a group Susan belongs to and I aspire to.

That's enough crabbing about the state of journalism everywhere else. It's time to get on to solving the problem at hand: Talking some other fool, or group of fools, into learning enough of what we know to continue publishing The Weekly Journal until the Internet itself passes into history.

The requirements are pretty simple. First and foremost you have to be marginally insane. Second, you have to have the ability to convince everyone else you're not marginally insane. And third, you have to have enough creativity to ignore the reality almost everyone else perceives and create one of your own.

Of course there are others, like enjoying throwing away past due notices, having the ability to ignore the fact that complete morons are often getting rich while you're throwing away your past due notices, and knowing what you write will, more often than not, either not be read or will be forgotten soon after it is.

If you can handle all of that, give us a call and we promise to pay you nothing, and hardly ever verbally abuse you, while you're in training.

I guess we need a catch phrase, like "An Army of One".

“Journalism, if you can stand the pain.”

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