Pittsblog: Eight Years is Enough

Pittsblog followers -- and a few loyalists are still out there, I believe -- have noticed the steady decline over the last many months in the frequency of posting here.  There are lots of explanations and no excuses.  The reality is that I have simply gotten too busy to give the blog regular attention and too interested and engaged in things going on both outside of Pittsburgh and in my little corners of Pittsburgh to spend energy writing anything more about the place.  This will be the last Pittsblog post.  I promise.

Earlier this Fall, I started a short series called "Fresh Eyes on Pittsburgh," and I promised five posts.  I managed to produce three of them, and you can find them here (on the economy), here (on Pittsburgh society and community), and here (on culture, particularly sports).  I had hoped to write about Pittsburgh politics, and about Pittsburgh's environment (natural resources, I mean), but looking back and looking forward, I just don't have the time or the energy.  For the omitted posts, I throw myself on the proverbial mercy of the blogosphere.  I have long planned to wrap this whole thing up by the new year.  I started Pittsblog way back on December 31, 2003, and I'll end it just shy of the blog's eighth birthday.

I stopped blogging here once before. That turned out to be a false start, as it were.  Then, it turned out that there was more that I wanted to say.  Now, that's not the case.  (Plus, the blogosphere as a whole is steadily being absorbed into the Twitterverse.  How many of the old-time, once-novel Pittsburgh blogs are still around?  Tube City may be the last.)  The blog will stay up, at least as long as Google will have me.  My final word, for what it's worth, will end up in print.  The Pittsblog series known once and for the foreseesable future as "The Story Behind Pittsburgh's Revitalization" is being adapted into a chapter in a forthcoming edited collection on the renewal of American's cities.

Eight years of blogging are too much to wrap up in a single post.  The most important thing to say is thanks.  Thanks to all of you who read, who continued to read, who commented, who disagreed and criticized and told me that I was and am wrong, very wrong (yes - I mean that), and most of all who reached out in one way or another.  Perhaps the most important benefits of my blogging here have been the gifts of friendship that I received from blogging colleagues; media colleagues; law and business colleagues; arts, tech, and culture colleagues; higher education colleagues; and non-colleague colleagues -- individual souls, often named, sometimes anonymous and pseudonymous -- who took time to engage at Pittsblog in the construction of the continuing project that is Pittsburgh.  Many of the people who began as my Pittsblog readers and correspondents have become my Pittsburgh friends. 

True gifts, I have learned, are given again.  They stay in motion.  Pittsblog will close, and it closes now.  But the point is not farewell, let alone a Pittsburgh-ish "Bye now."

The point is this:

Hello.