If you’ve noticed it has been pretty quiet here, especially in terms of posts from “The Management,” you’re on to something. The folks who’ve long been behind the PetConnection — me, Christie and Dr. Marty Becker — have been involved in a start-up, and now that it has, in fact, started up, we’re packing up the PetConnection.
Destination: Vetstreet.com.
After Aug. 31, this site will go dark. People who type in “PetConnection.com” will end up on the new site. A lot of the content is already there, and a lot of our contributors will be, too. Dr. Becker and I have been working with the Vetstreet team for months, and Christie has started with them recently in the final stages of the transition. While not all our bloggers will go along for one reason or another, most will, and that makes the people behind Vetstreet very happy. They’ve been fans of ours for a very long time. In a short time, I’ve become fans of theirs.
As you can well imagine,though, I have mixed feeling about the change.
I never liked the name, “Pet Connection.” In fact, I loathed it. “Pet Connection” was already the name of the pet column I took over the mid-’80s, when I was a young reporter and editor at The Sacramento Bee. I tried to change it then, but couldn’t come up with anything the bosses liked better. It seemed — and still seems — too lightweight for the work I’ve always done, and that we all did as our team grew. We love pets, but we also love medicine and reporting, and our work here always tried — and usually succeeded — to offer the best-practice work of both worlds.
When Universal Press picked the column up for national distribution, they liked the name, too. I gave up, bought the domain name and put a simple site to serve as a marketing device for the syndicated column. And that, I thought, would be that.
And then, at Christie’s urging, we added a blog.
The world changed just about then, although in fact the seeds of change had been planted years earlier.
Christie and I had been friends for several years at that point, although we almost never saw each other and rarely even talked on the phone. We’d met while working for the Pet Care Forum on America Online. PCF was owned and run by the Veterinary Information Network (VIN) at the time, and I left the newspaper to work for Dr. Paul Pion there.
Yes, everyone at the newspaper thought that was crazy.
But Christie and I were part of a culture no one had ever seen before. Our best friends were — and still are — people who live all over the world, people we used “electronic mail” and “instant messages” to connect with, starting with 600-baud dial-up modems and strange little computers — my first was a Radio Shack TRS-80 (a “rat shack” in the newspaper parlance, with 8K of memory) and my second was the original Macintosh. The Mac I’m typing on now (my first Mac in 25 years of PCs) is my 23rd computer, and it’s part of a network of four computers (a desktop and three laptops/netbooks) that use a screaming fast home wi-fi network I could never have imagined having even a decade ago.
You all pretty much know where the story goes from there.
Until the latest chapter, that is.
Up until a couple days ago, Vetstreet was mostly known as a company that helped veterinary practices communicate with their clients. But behind the scenes, something massive was being developed – a site for pet-lovers to find accurate medical and behavior information. Dr. Becker knew the people behind Vetstreet, and they started talking with us about coming aboard.
We danced a long time, but it felt right and we all knew it. Moreover, Vetstreet had the team and the money to do many of the things I’ve always wanted to do with our website. Dr. Becker was a natural fit; I flew back to work with the team in D.C. and realized I liked the fit, too. Christie is finalizing her relationship now, and the dancing continues with the rest of our bloggers.
I’m very happy with the decision, and I see great things ahead for Vetstreet as a place where people can go to find the best practices of journalism and medicine well-represented.
Check it out. I think you’ll agree.
In the meantime, we’ll have this site up for a few more days as we migrate the content and people over.
I can’t thank my colleagues enough for their work on their site. I’m also so grateful for my friend Jay Gavron for the site design — including the heart-and-paw logo which is now tattooed on my back! — and Mike Linville of Black Dog Studios for every tech thing, getting us through the pet-food recall, denial of service attacks and so much more.
Of course, the biggest thank-you goes to you, the readers. I promise you we won’t stop writing, as long as you keep reading.
Come on down to Vetstreet. I think you’ll like the new place just fine.
Image, lower right: Yes, I really did it. I had the Pet Connection logo tattooed onto my upper back when I had a couple of days in Portland last May — this pic was taken immediately after it was done. No, it didn’t hurt that much. And yes, I’m happy I did it. Very, very happy.
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