Monday, February 02, 2009

He's Ba-a-a-a-ck

Chad Hermann, he of the quick and lacerating wit and last seen leaving the blogosphere as Teacher.Wordsmith.Madman disappeared abruptly last September, has turned up in a surprising place (if you can find it): The virtual pages of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Chad's new blog, The Radical Middle, debuted there yesterday.

From his first post:

Three months ago -- only a little more than an hour after I'd declared to a conference room full of PG writers and editors that blogs were dead -- I agreed to start again.

Because a few of those writers urged me to. Because one of those editors asked me to. Because that same editor assured me, as much as she possibly could, that many of the concerns and frustrations that drove me away from blogging would be, if not eliminated, at least contained and controlled on this site. But mostly because, despite those concerns and frustrations, despite the insults and death wishes and partisan hackery and intellectual dishonesty that so often oozed my way, I still wanted to believe in what I'd been doing. Or at least been trying to do.


Welcome back, Chad. Think you can get your editors to do something about that appalling site design? Because if a man blogs at the Post-Gazette and no one can find it, did he really blog at all?

3 comments:

Schultz said...

Wow, Chad Hermann blogging for the PG, who would have thought?!

Bram Reichbaum said...

No problem finding it -- LOADING anything on the PG website took forever and a half today!!

Between the spike of national and international viewers looking for an inside glimpse of Sixburgh festivities, and of course the launching of the Radical Middle, PG "Now" slowed to a crawl that was reminiscent of then -- like, 14,400 baud modem then. (That's bad).

Bram Reichbaum said...

A day later. Sad to report that community.post-gazette.com is effectively broken. I'm now getting the main P-G website to pop up pretty obediently, but the community is taking upwards of a minute if at all.

Google is my publisher; I shall not want.