Some Friday Fun: One Year In
A few thoughts on writing "The Topline" for twelve full months.
Because we are at that stage in life where short-term memory isn’t the only thing failing, we completely missed that this little exercise in creative writing marked its first anniversary. Indeed, March 3rd marked one full revolution around the sun since we started authoring “The Topline.”
And what a year it has been.
When we walked out of a working local TV newsroom for the last time early last year, it was the first time we were not employed full-time in five decades. We believed that we needed and deserved the break. But like far too many of our generational peers in this crazy business, we couldn’t go full-on cold turkey.
After all, it is the news business. It is, to some varying degree, like cheap heroin. Once it’s inside your veins, you find that you really can’t live without it. Even if you aren’t working in a newsroom, you are still somewhat obsessed with what happens in one. Perhaps all of them.
What the year has taught us, if nothing else, is that despite our very best efforts, we are not a columnist on the level of the Defector’s Drew Magary. And that is despite our mutual fandom of the ever-frustrating Minnesota Vikings. We keep working on having Drew’s gift of authoring shade that is at the solar eclipse level of being both devastatingly accurate and hysterically funny.
And that man does this after having a catastrophic brain hemorrhage back in 2018.
God bless him--and respectfully, screw him at the same time.
Aside from all that authoring envy, we have managed to pump out nearly 150 items in the past twelve months, averaging about three a week, so we consider that a pretty strong output, given that we aren’t getting paid to deliver all this goodness to you, dear reader. Don’t worry, like you, we find we are paying for way too many subscriptions each month, so we still aren’t planning to charge for “The Topline” anytime soon.
But if you’ll allow us a moment of local PBS station fundraising-like begging here, it would be great if we could grow our subscriber count just a little bit. If you are already a subscriber here, we honestly can’t thank you enough. (Sorry, we don’t have any tote bags available to send you!) Your support means a great deal to us, and we hope you have found value in our dispatches. And maybe at least a chuckle or two.
If you’d like to support our efforts without having to spend a nickel, please consider forwarding this column to anyone you think might enjoy it. Even someone you really dislike and want to clog up their email inbox.
And if you aren’t a subscriber yet, what exactly is keeping you from signing up? Your phony email address is flooded with countless offers from companies for the online discounts you signed up for. Your inbox has too many messages from OnlyFans creators that you just happened to stumble across, and can’t handle one more thing coming in?
Unlike all those heathens, we promise we won’t ever spam you with anything other than what we publish a few times each week. Plus, you can definitely find a few other things worth your time on Substack, where we now publish “The Topline.” Just like every other suddenly out-of-work journalist, it appears. “Going independent” is the new mantra replacing “I’m taking some time between jobs to work on myself.”
Anyway, we wanted to mark the occasion of making it through our freshman year as an independent publisher and to thank you for being part of the journey. We have some fun things planned for our sophomore season, and we hope to continue to be worthy of your time and interest. Certainly, the industry news for the television business shows no signs of being any less insane, any time soon. Same for pretty much all the news we are seeing each day.
Including whatever the hell the Vikings are up to in this off-season.
We’ll be back on Monday with the latest on some matter far more serious than this. Do enjoy your weekend.
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