My professional career has been spent doing a variety of things. When I started as a journalist I was doing obituaries and compiling religion events for a church calendar. It didn’t stop there: cop logs, hard news, fluffy features, military news, a city beat, several school beats, part-time photographer, full-time photographer … at one point, as a joke by an editor who knew I was single at the time, I was designated the “cheerleader reporter” after covering a local Arizona Cardinal dancer. By default I still retain that title.Anyway, I have done a lot. But only after I started writing about movies, music and pop culture did I truly find a home. For a long time I only had my movie reviews, then slowly I began writing about music (in SPIN magazine even), and later still I would slip in some culture-type stories (in one of my first I proclaimed the iPod to be the best thing to happen to music since the electric guitar). Eventually I combined all three things into my own section in the newspaper — I called it Volume. The early forms of the full-page section were crude and boring; now they’re the best designed paper in the West Valley View. Until recently, they’ve only been available in print in the newspaper. Now, for the first time ever, they’re available on the Web. And not just the current issues, either; even some of the back issues are available going back to last summer. Production genius Jonathan Barnes, who has designed and built Volume from the very beginning, has built a spiffy new site where you can check out our different pages. Also on the site is an e-mail contact for myself and my editor. Please, please, please write in and comment on the pages or tell us what you’d like to see in Volume. Here are the links:
