Retrospective

When I think about this new endeavor – Talk of the Town – it amazes me in many ways.

About 15 years ago when I began my career in journalism, the only future I saw involved ink and newsprint. If I wanted to write, my means of getting the word out were rather limited. I would need to work for an existing publication surely. Owning my own publication, as exciting as that sounded, wasn’t really an option – particularly to someone just out of high school.

I still felt that way as I worked through college, gaining skills and experience at various publications along the way. Considering the expense of either owning printing equipment or outsourcing your printing expense, there was little opportunity for another form of communication. Even with more time and experience, owning my own personal media was still a pipe dream.

I remember learning about the internet toward the end of college and I remember being forced to communicate with other classmates via something called “e-mail.” I remember thinking, “What a waste of time! I can talk to these people in person or over the phone, so why do I need to get on a computer to converse with them?” This seemed completely foreign to me as did this strange “superhighway” called the internet – I mean, really how were we going to have access to all of this information that was not in any one particular place? I would have never imagined that I would make such technology the basis of a business – let alone have it become such an integral part of my daily life.

Fast forward a few years and now I check my  e-mail all the time, chatting with friends in the same town and cousins around the world.  I use the internet for everything from looking up a telephone number to reading the news, researching a recipe for dinner and finding directions to a store in another town. I can use the internet to watch the sun rise and set in another town or to see if it is raining in Paisley, Scotland, at this very moment. On this very computer, I learned the names of my ancestors, marveled at their penmanship on documents I'll never see in person. I've bought and sold things I use every day via the internet. Without leaving my home, I can be very much connected to the world around me.

It is amazing what technology has done for us and, in my own personal life, what it has enabled me to do with regards to changing gears from writing with ink and paper to sharing news in another way. Driving enroute to Warsaw with my husband for dinner last night, I remarked at how it would not have been possible for me to have my own business such as this just a few years ago – the technology didn’t exist to publish something online that everyone could read nor did I have the access to the resources I needed to make this happen.

I initially began this website as a means of reaching out to those in our county with news – particularly the news I knew wasn’t getting out via the existing form of media in our community. But over the past few days I have learned that Talk of the Town has become much more far reaching than even I had hoped. Via the internet, we’re uniting people from as far away as New York, Alaska and Mississippi as well as dozens of other places well outside the Whitley County lines. That is amazing to me! I have received notes from far off places saying this site helps them keep in touch with a community they still love – though separated by time and distance. That is truly a beautiful thing and something that makes me very proud.

So, here we are today – one woman, a digital camera, a computer, a love of this community and an interest in promoting our best attributes. We have an exciting road ahead of us.

Jennifer Zartman Romano