One of the things that makes the Tucson Weekly so strong (we are the reigning non-daily Arizona Newspaper of the Year, thank you very much) is the fact that we have so many veteran writers and reporters.
Jim Nintzel, Leo W. Banks, Tim Vanderpool, Tom Danehy and Margaret Regan have all been scribes for the paper for the better part of two decades or longer. In the 10-years-more-or-less club, you have Irene Messina, Stephen Seigel, Linda Ray, Gene Armstrong, Renée Downing, Bob Grimm, Rita Connelly and a few others. As for the 5-year group, the names are too numerous to mention.
All of this adds up to institutional knowledge, great sources and unparalleled knowledge of the city and the topics we're covering.
While the Weekly has been a force in dead-tree form for almost 30 years, and in once-a-week pixelated form for 17-plus, our daily-ish online presence is relatively new. We launched our blog in 2006, but The Range, which is what we now call our daily dispatch, only really took off as a news force to be reckoned with three or four years ago.
Mentioning all of this brings me to someone who has toiled for the Tucson Weekly for nowhere near as long as the aforementioned people.
Our web producer, Dan Gibson, has played a big part in helping The Range to become the indispensable Southern Arizona information source that it is today. By the time you read this, Dan will be working for someone else—Clear Channel, to be specific—and I can also tell you that by the time you read this, we'll already be missing Dan.
Good luck with the new gig, Gibson.
