Coupeville Sports

My anger for how The Examiner went out? I need to let it go. Probably should let this shirt go too. It’s getting a little drafty.

  “Cookies! Bring me all the cookies now … for I am Maddie Big Time and I have earned them!!” (John Fisken photo)

This is my only job. At least for now.

Having walked out Sunday (literally) on my restaurant gig, after being there close to two years, I am free to put my full 100% into Coupeville Sports for the first time in the 22.5 months it has been in existence.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be down at Penn Cove, being a beach bum.

A Washington state-bred, rocky beach-usin’, is-it-even-55-degrees-out-here-complainin’, cold water-splashin’ beach bum…

A beach bum who hopes that, if folks like what they’re getting here, they might consider chipping in a buck or three to the cause. How convenient that I have a donation button at the top of the blog.

Handy.

While down at the beach — the barnacle-encrusted, jagged-rock-strewn beach — I will ponder the twists and turns Coupeville Sports has taken.

This blog started in anger.

I was mad at the Whidbey Examiner for selling out to a giant Canadian media conglomerate that already owned the Whidbey News-Times and South Whidbey Record.

I was mad Canada erased hundreds of my bylined stories off of what was now their web site.

I may have referred to the former owner of the Examiner as a carpetbagger. Actually, I’m sure I did.

Not the first time I ticked her off. By a long shot.

Perhaps, maybe, if we all believe hard enough, I will show some personal growth and it’ll be the final time I do so. That would be nice.

But as Coupeville Sports took off, hitting heights I didn’t think possible, as I have pulled in far bigger readership numbers than expected, as I delivered onto you 2,206 articles (they weren’t all gems, but dang, that’s 3.5 articles a day for almost two years, doing it PART TIME), most of the anger abated.

I have still continued to poke the eeeeeeeviiiiiillllll Canuck media empire that owns the three “local” papers, but I am trying (seriously) to tone that down a bit.

They’re not going to give me back my articles, and, at this point, I don’t much care.

Coupeville Sports has given me what I wanted most as a journalist (or whatever you want to call me — writer, blogger, spleen-venter, “that idiot who won’t shut up”) — freedom.

I don’t answer to an editor. No one touches my words except me. I publish what I want, when I want and how I want.

2:17 AM — the time when all the best articles get published. It’s true.

It has been liberating and, after 24 years of on-again, off-again sports coverage on Whidbey Island, there is a joy in my work again that was missing for a big chunk of that time.

What we have here in Coupeville Sports is something the papers can’t offer, because it’s not how they work. And I don’t mean that as a slam on them.

The newspapers are the responsible adult in the room.

I don’t have to be responsible, or act like an adult. I can be Dennis the Menace peeking over the fence and screaming, “Hey, guess what I heard?!?!?!?”

Newspapers report. They are part of the community, but there is always a level of removal from the people they cover. It’s how they operate.

Coupeville Sports is YOU, the people.

I may be largely writing it, but it exists because of the countless people who give me photos for free, who slip me info and gossip, who point me in new directions, who read my work, who tell me what they like or loudly yell at me about what they hated.

We can create larger-than-life myths, turning Madeline Strasburg into Maddie Big Time and convincing her to flex her guns for the camera guy after crackin’ a home run, than payin’ her off in cookies from the dozens donated to me by softball moms.

The News-Times won’t do that, can’t do that, and I don’t expect them to. It’s not how professional newspapers work.

Which is why I’m glad I don’t work for a professional paper, as I have done several times in my checkered employment past.

I’m having more fun this way. And now, I’m going to do it full-time.