Goodbye to IN Touch

Beginning in late 2008, I wrote an occasional entry for The Indianapolis Star’s IN Touch blog. A number of my entries were also published in the print edition of the newspaper. While I liked writing for IN Touch, I often found it difficult to find topics for which IN Touch was an appropriate venue and on which I could articulate my thoughts in a fairly short number of words (as readers of this blog know, brevity is not exactly my strong suit). Thus, my output was never as high as I would have liked and I hadn’t written anything at all for IN Touch since last August (wow, I didn’t realize it had been that long!).

Anyway, I discovered a week or two ago, that the IN Touch blog has apparently been completely removed from The Indianapolis Star’s website. If you go to the IN Touch page, you are greeted by the message:

This user has elected to delete their account and the content is no longer available.

I emailed my contact at the paper to see why and when the IN Touch page was deleted and why the posts were not (apparently) archived. To date, I haven’t received any response. I guess that I can understand the decision to eliminate this feature (it seems that the number of posts had declined dramatically in recent months), but I don’t understand the decision not to maintain an archive of those posts, especially as many of them were included in the print edition of the paper. Oh, well.

So, I guess that my days of writing for IN Touch are now officially over. It was fun while it lasted.