Where were you two years ago? Where will you be two years from now?

Two years ago my father was battling throat cancer, I was just over six months married, and the ground was still quaking from economic meltdown. I was also starting this blog.

I started LPJ because I had just begun a full-time job at a newspaper, a medium that had been hemorrhaging for years. The job was in a town that had been hemorrhaging as well, Berlin N.H. The industry and the town were two of the same. They were used to the good times, to American dominance, successful manufacturing and booming profits. Newspapers and Berlin were built for the mid-twentieth century, and the early twenty-first was wearing on both of them.

But I had a job, so I was flying high.

The Reporter wasn’t interested in giving me a blog on their website, so after a couple weeks of trying to convince them I decided to start my own. It focused mostly on Berlin and what I was covering at first, but over time I began to look more and more at journalism in general. Where was the industry going? What are the opportunities for people like me who want to continue to tell the stories both at home and abroad that are too often overlooked? How can I make that happen when the financial mechanisms that supported reporters for the last 100 years are proving inadequate?

If someone wants something, however, it’s up to them to make it happen.

If you had told me two years ago I would soon be riding a Humvee through the Mideast I would have said you were crazy. But then I made it happen.

I don’t know where I’ll be next. I’m now working in Conway, N.H., for the Conway Daily Sun, a great little paper with a fantastic atmosphere. I also still send stories to NHPR, something I’ve been doing for even longer than I’ve been running LPJ. I’m not sure where I’ll look next or what the next adventure will be, but it’s nice to see what can happen over two years. Hopefully the next two have as many surprises.