Natali Del Conte

Mark, my producer and very good friend, collected outtakes from Loaded and other CNET TV productions and put together this fun little montage. It may be one of those you-had-to-be-there things but it made me laugh. We have a little too much fun working together. Enjoy the especially low point about three minutes in when I do a Flash Dance interpretation.

Dennis Richmond signed off on his final news broadcast last night after 40 years on the air at KTVU. I regret that I wasn’t home in the Bay Area to see this live but I just watched from my office here in New York and I unexpectedly started to cry. You can watch his farewell here.

As I watched this, I realized how powerful broadcast news can be. For most Bay Areans, Dennis Richmond was a stabilizer during times of chaos. During the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the 1991 Oakland fires, my family tuned into KTVU to watch him and somehow hearing the news from someone we came to know and trust made us feel like everything would be okay. We were comforted by his presence.

I am sad that Dennis Richmond won’t be on the air when I finally move home some day but he deserves a royal retirement and from the looks of this montage, he is well on his way. In the off chance that he reads this blog, I want to wish him luck on the next chapter of his life. Thank you for setting such a high standard of journalistic excellence, Dennis Richmond. My family and I will miss you.

So I’ve been Twittering a little lately. Just a little bit here and there for the last week and a half. I have to say, I don’t find it addicting the way so many people claim to but I don’t hate it the way I had anticipated. I’d call myself a casual and lukewarm Twitterer but a Twitterer nevertheless.

I resisted Twitter for a long time for a few reasons. First of all, I sometimes feel like I am public enough when it comes to the Internet. I often joke with the Loaded crew that I am the Rachael Ray of technology journalism. Not that I don’t like Rachael Ray but I think she is grossly overexposed and I would hate for people to feel the law of diminishing returns when it comes to my online persona.

Another reason I resisted Twitter was the same reason that I don’t blog on this site as often as I should. It is a lot of pressure to continuously produce content, especially for someone like me who produces content all day every day for a living. I have a daily news show, keep my Facebook status updated, and blog regularly. At the end of the day, I’m pretty tapped out of original thoughts.

Beyond the pressure to produce regular content is the pressure to produce interesting content. What if we all discover that I’m really not that interesting? That secret, by the way, is one that my family considers long-since out.

Finally, I really don’t need the distraction. I am one busy girl. I am in a perpetual state of email bankruptcy, sleep deprivation, and being overwhelmed. I don’t have time to hear about strangers and their cat feeding schedules. I barely have time for the people I love. This weekend my sister put her arm around me and said, “Lets talk about how you’re going to devote more time to me.”

Despite all of these valid reasons not to Twitter, I am doing it anyway. My reasons to Twitter are few but they include sheer curiosity, a desire to see if my random thoughts really do have a forum, and peer pressure from Cali Lewis. Besides, I had a Lucille Ball moment yesterday as I was emailing from my iPhone and trying to cross the street in SoHo. I tripped in front of a stoplight full of cars in a supremely ungraceful way. I looked around for someone to laugh with but no New Yorker seemed game for that. So I Twittered. I have to say, it was a marginally fulfilling outlet. I’ll keep at it but don’t say I didn’t warn you if you find me uninteresting!

If you want to follow my Twitters, you can find them here.