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Jim Romenesko has been on vacation from his long-running media notes blog for a couple of weeks, and yesterday he made a small but crucial change to his away note. He changed "vacation" to "retirement." We spoke briefly by email last night and he's not fully retiring. But he is cutting way back from his schedule of daily posting, a pace he has kept up for more than 10 years, with limited small breaks here and there. He says he'll now tend to tweet or post on Facebook when he sees something that interests him — once an items guy, always an items guy. But the full blog posts will be less frequent and more selective. We agreed that a good description for the change is that he's dialing back, but not switching off entirely.
From his site:
Actually, I’m not going away; “retirement” for me is sleeping in, lounging around in the mornings (watching Colbert/Wilmore, etc.), and having several cups of coffee before opening the laptop. (If you see morning tweets, they’ve come from my iPad.) If I spot a good story – or you send me something worth pursuing – I’ll still post it here.
I totally get it. Jim wants to travel more and not be tied to a laptop all the time, especially in the morning. Being free of the expectations of his many readers that he will be there as their first read in the morning will liberate him to do other things with his life. Blogging when you want to, not when you have to.
Round of applause, folks. Jim basically created the media notes blog and was the first journalist I know of to get paid a full-time salary to blog. That changed when he left Poynter's nest a few years ago, and he's still been there all this time. His away note now also says: "Sorry, but I’m no longer accepting sponsored posts or job ads."
