So, I finally put a bullet in the head of Albany Eye. It was a long time coming.
Albany Eye was a blog I wrote about local news and the media from 2004 to 2006. Its tart and snarky posts attracted a fairly good-sized audience before it came crashing down; what began as a lark got out of hand and nearly cost me everything.
The blog has stayed up online since then, but it’s effectively gone now. While it still exists, the site is restricted to invited readers only. And there won’t be any. I didn’t have the heart to delete the whole thing.
This came about after I received an email from someone I wrote about in Albany Eye long ago. They’d gotten in some trouble with the law, and I penned a couple of cheeky posts linking to news stories where they were named. After years of my stuff popping up in Google searches, the person reached out this week and asked me to take down the posts. I did so immediately.
That’s when it struck me that maybe it would be better if none of the Albany Eye blog posts were still out there.
I wrote some shitty things in that blog. I can’t change that now, but erasing it from the web is a small step in the right direction. In retrospect, I never should have started Albany Eye, and believe me, it was never anything but trouble.
It’s not possible to apologize to everyone I poked fun at, so it will have to suffice for me to say that I feel deep remorse for the way my actions affected people. Much of it was harmless, but sometimes the posts I wrote hurt people’s feelings.
Yes, one or two of them richly deserved it, but they were the minority.
In related news, the Times Union finally relented and took down the blog I used to write on their site. I always hated that they claimed ownership over my writing, and after a decade-long battle, it’s finally gone.
So here I am, pushing 60, and slowly vanishing. We can’t erase memories, but it’s not such a bad thing to clean up some of the little messes we leave behind.