The Laughing Wolf

Thank You Joe Katzman

It seems like it has been forever. It seems like it was just yesterday.

Online news sources and communities were different then, and the rise of the Blog was just beginning. To be honest, while I knew the term and perused a couple, blogs and blogging really didn't register with me that much. The rough and ready forum of Baen's Bar was a favorite stop for news, discussion, and debate. And the occasional cyber bar fight.

All that changed one morning when a story broke on about some teachers behaving very badly towards children of soldiers. My first response was to call "Bull!" I figured it would take very little to show the story was bogus, so I set out to do some real journalism. What I found is something much worse than is accepted as conventional wisdom today. Among other things I found, thankfully, that I could never qualify as a "Real Journalist" again as when the families asked that the story be dropped (they had to live there with those people, and continuing could have made things bad and put the kids in a worse position), I dropped it.

I followed the story on my own, and didn't have client. I went to the Bar and started reporting what I was finding, and John Ringo told me there was someone I should meet. A sort time later, I was e-mailing with Joe Katzman, founder and original writer for Winds of Change. Almost immediately, I found myself a proud Citizen Journalist -- living up to what I had been taught journalism ought to be -- and posting at Winds.

Joe encouraged me, taught me about this brave new world that was starting to change the face of information and information warfare, and gave the occasional good swift kick when needed. I knew of his goals for Winds, and was and am proud to have been a part. I also knew that Winds was not the place for some of what I wrote, the little stuff, the day-to-day, the humor. So, with Joe's help, I started Laughing Wolf.

It was a lot of help. My last formal programming class was Fortran IV on punch cards, and it showed. Joe helped with coding, templates, anti-spam, and continued to encourage, kick, and do. I thought it only proper to do a couple of things as a result. First, Winds of Change went to a special place at the top of my blogroll. Second, I decided to do my own take on special Saturday posts. Joe had started doing "Good News Saturdays" as a way of helping promote thought and coverage of good news. It was a day of rest, of respite of the overwhelming and relentless onslaught of negative coverage in the Old Media and even the bad news covered in the blogs. My own take was "Food For Thought" so that I could cover a complementary but different range of topics.

All things, however, must come to an end. Change blows constantly around the world, even within the world of blogs. Most especially within a site devoted to covering and encouraging those winds. I have known what was coming, but a certain sense of denial has been there too. Yet, last Saturday, Joe told the world, and pulled the plug of Good News Saturdays and his current participation in Winds.

The changes in Joe's life are good, wonderful, and right and I want to wish him and his bride-to-be all the good things in life. May the light shine on them, on the new path they walk together, and fill their new life with health, happiness, joy, love, and prosperity.

Winds will grow, change, and continue. That is the way of things, and the way Joe envisioned and worked to make happen with what I will continue to think of as his blog. So will the blogosphere, as I am but one of many for whom Joe provided assistance and encouragement. Each one of us apparently decided to emulate that, so the ranks grow and become legion. Joe's legions.

Thank you so very much, my Blogfather. This does not begin to cover it all, but it is a start. Thank you, thank you for all you have done.

The cue here should be for a sunset, but that is not right. For what you ride off into right now is not a sunset, but the sunrise of a bright new day. A new road, the right road for the two of you. May our respective roads continue to meet and parallel.

LW