There was a clear reason for the first four months of the hiatus: I took a detour from journalism and entered the race for public life as the mayoralty candidate for the Non-Partisan Association. It would have been an ethical challenge to discuss current media while running for office.
I lost the race and have put a couple of months of distance from that event. Last month I resumed duties as Executive Director of the Organization of News Ombudsmen. Last week I returned to University of British Columbia as an Adjunct Professor in the journalism program to co-teach ethics and leadership.
The site is seven years old this month, and I think it's well past time for a little shift in the approach. I'm going to merge the presswatching.com site I launched last year with it and create a couple of columns each week while keeping the focus on newsworthy links of interest in ethics, standards and the media's relationship with the public.
Traffic on the site has remained quite healthy during the absence, obviously owing to the resources I've compiled. I'm going to take another run at them in the days ahead and hope to keep the site one of the stronger ones for media resources.