Daily Archives: July 3, 2006

For a variety of reasons, I haven’t been completely transparent about my current employment situation.

The fact is, since May 31, I’ve been unemployed. This hasn’t been entirely by choice, but not unwelcome either.

I’m proud of what I helped initiate for Bakersfield.com. Here’s a partial list of some of our accomplishments.

• Complete site redesign. It’s cleaner, better organized, highlights news updates and multimedia better, has better advertising positions, and it garnered a lot of praise from my colleagues in the industry.
• Adding profiles to registration, which enabled the creation of blogs for users. Turning registration into a social network was my second highest priority (making money was #1) when I signed on with the Californian.
• Increased revenue.
• Upgraded our hosting arrangement (and all that goes with it, such as the CMS, etc.).
• Bringing in great vendors who helped us improve the site.
• Made a couple of good hires.
• Purchased multimedia equipment and spurred the news room to step up its multimedia efforts. They’re now doing more than a video per day.

When I interviewed for the job at the Californian, I laid out a plan for how we would improve the site and grow revenue. During the budget process, I refined that plan. Together, with my staff, we got right to business and executed that plan, but after a new executive structure, I had a new boss (I was surprised by the announcement) and we had very different ideas about how to define success and how to get there. I think we could have made it work, but the new boss had other plans.

I left the Californian having made a number of good friends. There are some really super people there and my staff was absolutely outstanding. I can’t say enough good things about them. The executive staff is also very talented, dedicated and kind, and I really enjoyed working with them.

Meanwhile, there’s a few lines in the water (this is not a bad time at all to be looking for a job in my field). I think something is going to come together soon. While I wait, I’ve been tending my garden, rebuilding RVClub.com (more on that in a future post, after the new site is live), and recently working on a special little project I’ll announce in a future post.

Unfortunately, I’ll probably have to leave Bakersfield. My wife is OK with that, but she hates to lose this wonderful house we bought, as do I. Also, it is a bit of a hardship on my parents, who moved here in part because I did (one of my bothers already lived here). But that’s life and that’s business. Things don’t always work out as planned. It’s hard for me to feel any regret about taking a job that didn’t work out under these circumstances, even though I left a great job and a great company to come here. In the short time I’ve been here I’ve had some outstanding experiences, grew and learned a lot at home and at work and I met some great people. Now, I believe better things are ahead. Stay tuned.

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