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Despite all the culture war bills getting most of the attention over the last several weeks, the 2024 session has been very slow. That's given me time to be nostalgic, thinking about the path that led me to this career in journalism.
I've been listening to a podcast called "Finding Matt Drudge," talking about Drudge's impact on news reporting since breaking the story about the investigation into former President Bill Clinton's relationship with a White House intern.
The Drudge Report was revolutionary in the mid-to-late 1990s. Drudge showed that one person -- not a news reporter or a big news organization -- could start a website and break big news. I was in high school at the time and instantly became a fan, refreshing my internet browser daily to see what Drudge would break next.
The Drudge Report influenced a young high school student in New Jersey to create a similar website called DaHiller which covered his high school and local community. I discovered DaHiller by reading an article for the Online Journalism Review by Matt Welch.
It was the Drudge Report and DaHiller that motivated me to create my first website around 2000 and write about politics and my life. It wasn't particularly a good website and I probably overused gifs. I was already on my high school newspaper editorial team in charge of our columnists. At the time, I wanted to be a professional syndicated columnist, a dream I'm already living now.
Just a few short years later, Welch would play a big role in the web log (blog) community in the early 2000s before blogging really blew up big. Reading Welch's War Blog led me to the blog of Ken Layne and the Busblog written by Tony Pierce. Welch later became an opinion editor for the L.A. Times and now is an editor-at-large for Reason magazine and co-host of the Fifth Column podcast. He just recently appeared on Ken Layne's Desert Oracle podcast to talk about the blogging days.
I was fascinated with blogging and being able to write about multiple topics - from politics to pop culture to one's own personal life - and the community blogging created. Bloggers would comment on each other's blogs, link to each other, and promote each other.
I had basically been blogging since 2000 and not realizing it, but I created my first blog during the summer of 2002 with a LiveJournal account. In 2003, I had built my first Blogger webpage and went by the name "Holywriter." It wasn't a pseudonym, as I used my real name on posts, but it was a homage to the word "holy roller," a term used to describe oneness Pentecostals, the faith I was raised in.
I was a college dropout beginning the winter of 2003, so I would work retail during the day and blog whenever I had the time, nearly daily. Blogging was my way of keeping the hopes of a journalism career alive. And it worked, because by 2006 I was doing radio news in the Mid-Ohio Valley and writing/editing a now-defunct weekly newspaper in Marietta, Ohio.
Over last summer I finished "Traffic," a book by Ben Smith, the former editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, which recounts the rise and fall of blogging and the history of websites like Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, and the Gawker media empire. The book took me back to a time when I was part of the West Virginia contingent of the blogging community and moved in some of those worlds.
Another book I finished recently is "The MAGA Diaries," by Tina Nguyen. The book is about understanding the supporters of former Republican president Donald Trump, but it is also a memoir of sorts of Nguyen's early journalism career that began in conservative media. She began her career with the Daily Caller but also nearly took a job with an affiliate of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which provided funds and training to state-based center-right think tanks.
The Public Policy Foundation of West Virginia, a libertarian think tank that used to be active in the state, was one of the recipients of grant funding for covering state government. I was brought on board in 2009 to create what became West Virginia Watchdog. I did that until the grant funding ran out in 2012, covering the statehouse and doing investigative stories.
There are several big-name reporters who have come out of center-right-leaning news outlets: Bob Costa, Tim Alberta, Oliver Darcy, Kaitlan Collins. Listening to the Ink Stained Wretches podcast with the Washington Free Beacon's Eliana Johnson and the great Chris Stirewalt with NewsNation, Johnson was critical of Nguyen's take on her time in center-right media and believes reporters who entered into the mainstream should show more gratitude.
Allow me then to step up and show my gratitude. I enjoyed my time doing West Virginia Watchdog. I had complete editorial freedom to pursue any story, including stories one wouldn't expect a center-right outlet to cover, such as the fact that state public workers are not protected by federal occupational safety and health regulations. I got to develop new skills in video that still serve me well today.
Most importantly, my experiences during that time help me today when giving helping hands to new statehouse reporters and nonprofit news outlets who are going through things today that I experienced back in 2010 when I first moved to Charleston to cover the Legislature for a nonprofit. I was treated suspiciously and in hindsight I can understand why. I don't want anyone to be treated the way I was at the time.
Without a doubt, I have had a very unconventional path to being your state government reporter. I enjoyed this week being able to share some of those lessons with students from West Virginia University who came to the Legislature for class reporting projects.
Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" comes to mind. I'm not sure where I would be if I took a different path to journalism, but "I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."