“He’s ba-a-a-a-a-ck.”

“He” being “me,” as I attempt to relaunch “Cliff’s Edge,” the weekly column I was contributing to this blog until about 13 months ago.

That’s when what my doctor diagnosed as a stroke booted my column-writing endeavor into what I had hoped was an early and temporary halt.

With your indulgence and that of Editor Scott Schaefer, I’m ready to test that theory again.
In my months of self-imposed journalistic silence, I’ve attempted to read as regularly and with as much diligence as I had previously. Results have varied, but have been encouraging for the most part.

I’ve concentrated primarily on the writing effort that has sustained me for nearly all of my professional career as a teacher and journalist. Ultimately, I want to renew my involvement with this publication and you, its readers, who have come with it.

It’s an interesting time to be involved with contemporary communication forms and practices. I believe they encourage the sharing of ideas in new and exciting ways on the one hand and discourage them it in equally depressing ways on the other.

Then again, maybe I’m just another aging geezer packing around thoughts that jave seemed so worthy of sharing at some point and seem less so now.

I just don’t know for certain. I do know that for so long as I can share these thoughts with others while hearing theirs in return, i want to do so.

So, once again, I come to you for your thoughts about topics of interest to you and offer in return an a sampling of what may be wandering about in my mind. I will look forward to whatever conclusions or questions spring from our efforts.

Whether I still merit a regular piece of space in this blog or an other publication must be determined again. I appreciate your — and the editor’s — willingness to clear a regular space in this newspaper in which to test the journalistic waters.

Cliff Rowe is a retired journalist and journalism professor. (He practiced both in a time before journalists and what they produced were considered “enemies of the people.”) He and his family have lived in the Shorewood area of White Center (then Burien) since 1969 when they returned to the Northwest after seven years in the Chicago area. There, following graduate school, he wrote and edited with the Chicago Sun-Times and with Paddock Publications in the Chicago suburbs. On moving here, he was with The Seattle Times for 11 years before turning to teaching journalism at Pacific Lutheran University for 35 years, retiring in 2015.

Since 2007, The B-Town Blog is Burien’s multiple award-winning hyperlocal news/events website dedicated to independent journalism.