Editor's Note: Andy Bitter has joined Tech Sideline as a full-time staff writer.
They say one of the bad things about your funeral is you’re not around to hear all the nice things people have to say about you.
Well, I didn’t die last month, but I sure got to hear what people thought of me after very publicly getting laid off from my former writing gig — and it was heartening.
Thoughts, condolences and well-wishes arrived in abundance. Many of you spared no detail in telling me the (sometimes profane) cancellation notices you sent to my previous stop, an action I didn’t ask for but have to admit brightened my mood. A stranger even gave me a reassuring pat on the shoulder in the frozen foods section at Kroger! It’s easy to see that the Hokies community cares.
Among the first people to reach out was Will Stewart, founder of Tech Sideline. His message was simple: Let’s talk.
And that’s why I’m here.
Coaches often have a rule that you have 24 hours to get over a loss. Well, I gave myself a 48-hour window for this particularly brutal setback, a gut punch of a layoff from a place I loved working for that I didn’t see coming. Once that pity party was over, it was time to find a path back to covering Virginia Tech athletics.
“Why?” you might ask. I mean, the football team is in rebuild mode. Last year was mostly forgettable. This doesn’t feel like the same program from the ’90s or 2000s. Sure, that might temporarily be true. It’s hard to imagine that didn’t factor into my previous employer’s decision-making.
But what I gleaned from the outpouring of support during the lowest moment of my professional life and month of unemployment was this is a fan base that still cares, that still yearns for information about its teams, that still lives and dies and laughs and cries with every game’s result.
You want your writing, above all else, to mean something to your readers, to move them in a certain way and engage their thinking. Many programs aren’t like that.
This place is. This is a community that lives and breathes Virginia Tech and has a fan base that deserves the coverage it gets, which is why I’m now at a place that won’t abandon it.
I’ve been aware of what Will and Chris Coleman and David Cunningham have been doing at TSL for a while. The site’s been ever-present since I joined the Hokies beat in 2011 and long before that. In a dwindling media landscape, they’ve persevered. Grown, even. And their comprehensive coverage reflects that.
I’m here to add whatever I can, however I can, bringing 21 years as a professional journalist to the fold.
The outlet might have changed, but the mission doesn’t. I’m here to provide honest, thorough, in-depth reporting about the Hokies, as I have for the last decade. I’m here to tell stories, to probe for answers to questions you as fans have, to dig for unique and behind-the-scenes looks into the program and, of course, to continue to quote “The Simpsons” liberally, despite the show’s cultural relevance being well in the rearview mirror.
Whether its breaking news, feature stories with a personal touch, wide-ranging and jocular mailbags, post-game analysis or podcasts — all the things I’ve done throughout my career — I’m here to deliver it with my co-workers at Tech Sideline, where I hope we can earn the privilege of your subscription.
Layoffs stink, but as Hyman Roth said in “The Godfather Part II,” this is the business we’ve chosen. That reaper eventually comes for all of us in this line of work, particularly in this day and age. But no matter what happened to me, there’s still an insatiable appetite out there from loyal fans and readers for reporting and news at the local level.
Well, Tech Sideline is what local journalism looks like for Hokies fans, and I’m ecstatic to be a part of it.
Let’s go …