Where’s the TU’s “Best of Our Blogs”?

It was a standard routine for me.  Get the Times Union print edition, turn to the Capital Region section, and look on page 1 of that section; it was a small little column called Best of Our Blogs.  If I saw a picture of a camera-wielding man, then I knew that my blog had made the daily cut as the Times Union’s  “Best of Our Blogs” featurette.  Swank.  If I didn’t see my picture there, then it meant someone else had won the accolade, and I would go read their blog and, more times than not, be impressed with the output.

That all changed when the Times Union installed their brand new printing press, and redesigned their print edition.  With all the updates and flashy changes and whatnot, the “Best of Our Blogs” feature was discontinued – culled – removed – essentially given the Old Yeller retirement plan.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s about as lame as using a pipecleaner for a root canal.

Look, it’s one thing to have a dedicated cadre of community bloggers maintain a collection of well-written blogs for the TU online portal, and don’t get me wrong – I do enjoy the opportunity to write a blog for the Times Union, heck I’ve enjoyed doing it for nearly four years now.  But losing that “Best of Our Blogs” featurette kinda hurts.  It’s almost as if the TU doesn’t want to give the community bloggers that extra impetus to write well-crafted blog posts for the portal.  Or maybe they only want to promote specific bloggers and not all of the ones in the blogfarm.

You know, I thought about this now and again.  There’s so many things that I can do about this injustice.  I could have walked up to the tallest building in the Town and Village, opened up the window, stuck my head out of the window and shouted, as loud as I possibly could, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!!”  I could have shouted, “That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more,” as I bust open a can of spinach.  I could have done a lot of things.

I still can do a lot of things.

But I chose to do this.

Effective today…

If the Times Union won’t return the “Best of Our Blogs” feature to the print edition, if they don’t feel that the community bloggers deserve their day in the sun, if the only blogs they feel like promoting are written by their staff…

Then, effective today and continuing every Thursday until further notice, I will use my blog to showcase blog posts from ten other Times Union community bloggers.  These are ten blog posts that I found to be worthwhile reading, entertaining, thought-provoking and well-conceived.

Trust me.  I’m not doing this to promote my own blog.  I already get a decent crowd and a decent following.  I’m really doing this to promote my fellow TU community bloggers, who deserve the exposure.  Remember that little phrase of mine – “bloggers support bloggers“?  Good.  What I’m doing is akin to the old “Blograma!” Friday blog recap that Kevin Marshall used to pen when he had a TU blog, but in my case I’m limiting it to ten different TU community bloggers each Thursday.  This is for showcasing my fellow friends and writers, as opposed to the TU’s staff bloggers; as far as I’m concerned, let a staff blogger promote the staff bloggers.

Heck, I still have a blog category left over on the blogroll called ‘Ten For Thursday,” which I can use for this little experiment.  “Ten for Thursday.”  That sounds like a good blog title.  Okay, “Ten for Thursday” is restored.

Starting with today.  So this week’s “Ten For Thursday” recap includes:

• Alyssa Johnson’s New York Wildlife blog, “A Short Story About Unlikely Demises.”
• Sonja Stark the PilotGirl, “Expedition Everest: Climbing the Mother Goddess of the World.”
• Assemblyman John McDonald, “A KaBoom on Catherine Street in Albany.”
• Renate Hartman in the Transgender blog, “The Wrong Road – The Low One.”
• Rev. Alan Rudnick, “Is This Art or Sacrilege?”
• Marianne DiNapoli, M.D., “The Three Funniest Moments of Med School.”
• Stephanie Snyder, A Professor’s Wife, “Moving Don’ts.”
• Don Rittner, “Troy Building was Once an Early Printer and School.”
• Mary Kenney’s “Pay It Forward” blog, “The ‘Un’assigned Project.”
• Jeannine Trimboli’s Real [Fit] Life blog, “Two Girls Climb High.”

And there you have it.  Ten entertaining blogs from the past week, ten posts worth your time and your effort to read and savor and enjoy and read again.

And I’ll keep doing this “Ten For Thursday” post series until the Times Union returns the “Best of Our Blogs” featurette back to the print edition.