Hello, I Must Be Going

Oswego, I hardly knew ye.

Seems like only days ago that I started as local editor for Oswego Patch, and now it’s time to move on. Today is my last day with Patch. As of tomorrow, I will no longer be your faithful editor.

I’ve accepted a job in Fermilab’s Office of Communication, which means I’ll be spending my days trying to figure out how to explain the Higgs boson and dark matter in plain language. (I consider these past few weeks covering District 308 to be good practice at putting the impossible into words... I kid! I kid because I love!) I’m pretty excited to start my new gig, even though it means waking up early and driving in to an office, two things I haven’t done in more than a year.

I’m going to miss Patch quite a lot, though. As most of you know, I started my time here launching Montgomery Patch, and I ran that site for more than a year before hopping over to Oswego. Telling your stories, in both towns, has been an honor and a privilege.

One thing I loved about Patch was the freedom it afforded me to try crazy ideas. Some of them didn’t work as well as I wanted them to (, which I still wish had drawn a bigger audience), but some of them made their mark. I’m intensely proud of the latest of these, my on four-year-old Kylie Arnold, who lost her battle with brain cancer earlier this year. There aren’t many places I could have told this story like this, and I’m grateful, both to Patch and to Kylie’s family, for making it happen.

Patch wasn’t always an easy job. I worked crazy hours, I had to deal with sometimes unbalanced anonymous comments, and I was under a huge amount of scrutiny (which is as it should be). But every time I got an email from someone thanking me for informing them about a community event, or a Facebook message from someone who was moved by a story I’d written, it was all worth it.

It has, seriously, been an honor. And there’s really only one thing more I want to say. I’ve written a couple dozen of these more personal columns over the past year and a half, and most of them have ended the same way. This one will be no exception, because what I really want to say is this:

Thank you.

Thank you for embracing Montgomery and Oswego Patch, and letting them into your lives. Thank you for trusting me to tell your stories. Thank you to everyone who ever sent me a news tip, or corrected a mistake I’d made. Thank you to everyone who wrote me, just to say you appreciated something I’d done. Thank you for a terrific 18 months. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

Oswego Patch isn’t going anywhere. Your best bet for now is to contact Associate Regional Editor Steven Jack, a familiar name around these parts. But I have it on good authority that you’ll be seeing a new local editor soon, and I can only hope you welcome the new person as openly as you welcomed me.

Goodbye, Oswego. Sorry I could only stay a short while. But I’ll be seeing you. Thanks again.