It’s been three years since I started this blog.  The first (on topic)  post was back in 2006 and it was a short post blogging Katie Couric’s move to NBC which prompted Newsweek to ponder if “the real action in TV news may be happening on the Web”

To say a lot has happened since then is, well an understatement to end all understatements and looking back over the posts it’s been great to see things develop and feel like, in some small and often bad tempered ways I have been able to be part of the debate.

Recently though life has got awful busy. I’m finding myself in front of a lot of journalists, training (which I don’t blog about as it’s chatham house rules when I work for others) and involved in a lot of exciting stuff including the recent infuze project. All of which is me trying to actively be a part of, rather than just talk about, where journalism is going and where (I think) it needs to be.

That’s put me on my back foot with my online presence. Getting in front of the blog to do anything other than echo what is already being said elsewhere is proving difficult and not being able to do so is proving very frustrating.

Equally frustrating, but a more recent issue,  is the quality of the debate. Not from my fellow bloggers in the jsphere where the debate is, if anything, so mature and rich in understanding and empathy that I’m at a loss to understand why people just aren’t doing this stuff. The problem is more with the lack of momentum it causes.

Whatever it is that’s causing it I think there are some bright, vibrant and essential voices out there and they are not only being ignored (unforgivable even in the current climate) but quite positively attacked by an old media rear-guard action that I thought we had lost around 2007.  A lot of the effort to make sense of where we are is being dismissed because “it has no answers”. I would say it’s a lack of understanding that got you here to start with so perhaps a bit of listening would do you no harm.

Maybe I’m  falling out of love with journalism at the moment. Perhaps when I read the morally outraged vitriol spouted about Jackie Smith’s husband and his porn films in a paper owned by and advertising films and content by the same ‘pornographers’ who made the films he watched I wonder just where quality journalism is. That quality journalism that the local media groups say they need to be given more freedom to protect by becoming even bigger versions of the monolithic media companies so poorly suited to the future media landscape. Maybe that’s what it is…

All of which hand wringing and gnashing of teeth leads me to the point of this post -  Andydickinson.net is going in to hold for the foreseeable future. I have the preliminary results of the video workload survey to get out but apart from that, to all intents and purposes the blog will close.

But before you cheer, I’m not going away.

Despite my current lack of taste for the blogging fight I’m fully intent in participating in the more dynamic conversation happening on and offline. Now is a time for doing – doing is what I do best. I have some other things I want to do as well and these will no doubt surface as (and if) they happen but blogging is moving off the agenda for a while.

So to all of those who comment and have commented, thank-you. Really, deeply, thank you. I’m hoping to comment more in return.

To all of those who have come this way via twitter, especially my recent glut of followers, sorry. I know what it’s like to turn up late and find the place closed. But hey I may still have something interesting to say.

The blog will come back and I can’t promise that I won’t post from time to time.  But for now I’m officially putting the shutters on the blog.