Living the life of a comics character

Rick Redfern and I have a lot in common.

Both he and I worked for a newspaper for 30-some-odd years. Both he and I are in our 50s. Both he and I rose to a certain level of prominence at our respective papers. He and I left our papers with buy-outs last year as part of the industry-wide downsizing. He and I are both trying to scratch out a place as bloggers.

The slightly weird part is that Redfern, pictured at left, is a character in the "Doonesbury" comic strip. Last time I pinched myself, I was real.

It's not the first time I've had a lot in common with a comic strip character. I actually was one for a while back in the mid-1970s at the University of New Hampshire thanks to my buddy Ken Sheldon.

He did a strip for the college newspaper -- The New Hampshire -- that played on the college life trials and mostly tribulations of me and my roommate Wally Cole.

It was bad enough to actually live out the tribulations; then I had to relive them each week in the comic strip. But it was all hilarious.

What's funny about sharing a life with Redfern, a creation of Gary Trudeau, is the eeriness of it all -- that we're about the same age, we were moved aside from the same profession, and we're trying to be taken seriously as bloggers.

It's hard as a blogger to be viewed with the same seriousness as a journalist. Anyone can be a blogger, but can anyone be a journalist? I don't think so. There's an elevated level of ethics, fairness, research and writing ability that define the latter. It said anyone can be a blogger by putting your name over whatever you want to write, however you want to write about it.

Redfern is looking to be taken seriously as a blogger. He's had a couple of recent exchanges with his wife, Joanie Caucus, that show she's not quite there in accepting him as a blogger the same way she accepted him as a journalist.

I feel the same way. I don't have the cred among the family and friends that I used to. I was doing a telephone interview recently for my auto insurance company and they asked about my profession, and I said, "Blogger." I had to repeat it a couple of times ... even had to spell it. Think it'll flag anything with the IRS when I put it on my taxes as my profession?

There are a lot of us bloggers out there with me and Redfern -- more than 100 million, so I've read.

The number of blog posts that are considered news are increasing at a rapid pace while the number of newspaper stories is decreasing, because of fewer newspapers, fewer newspaper pages ... and fewer newspaper journalists.

About 15,000 journalists lost their newspaper jobs in 2008.

Maybe, just maybe, with more of us out there in increasing numbers as bloggers, we'll be able to raise the credibility among the Joanie Caucuses of the world, or at least the real people of the world.

Here's Rick at work back in October, soon after his layoff (click on strip for larger image):