A Message from the Editor’s Chair: Ever since the end of last season, we let it be known that we were trying to determine the future of the Packerville, U.S.A. blog. We kept it up through much of the off-season, and headed into the pre-season hoping that we’d recapture or rekindle the fire that once burned in our green and gold souls for doing this platform justice. What we have determined is that we just don’t want to invest the hours that have become involved in the daily updates. It has become a chore, and we have no intention of carrying on if we don’t enjoy it.
To understand, let’s have a short synopsis of the history of Packerville U.S.A. in its different forms. It all started back in the early Holmgren Era, when we printed out and saved Packers news stories for posterity, and to share with others who were not yet on the Web. Over the years, what it evolved into was a weekly newsletter that we produced and sent via e-mail to many friends and relatives. If we do say so, it was the best of its kind and will never be equalled. That too, became eventually too burdensome to commit the necessary hours each week. We started up the blog in 2007, and the two ran side by side for several years. The last print edition of the Packerville, U.S.A. newsletter was a commemorative edition produced after Green Bay’s Super Bowl XLV victory over the Steelers in February 2011.
We switched over to running just the Web version of Packerville in early 2011, and used it to post links to all of the types of information that normally went into the newsletter. What most people don’t realize is the number of hours that were spent combing the internet for news to post as links each and every day. This was a tiring process, and it became much more difficult, as we explained earlier this summer, when the Green Bay Press-Gazette and Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel went behind “pay walls” with all of their Packer news. What this means is that non-subscribers can only access a small handful of articles each month — a fraction of what they used to read for free. We understand the business decision of doing this, but it became that much more difficult to find worthy Packers news to post as links here on the blog.
The bottom line is that we’ll no longer be posting links to news here, unless it is really something that we think needs to be passed along. What we will be doing here is sharing the historical Packers’ material that the blog was created for in the first place. Vintage and current magazines, programs, ads, old photos, as well as photos from our trips to Green Bay for training camp, the shareholders’ meeting, etc.
Does this mean some sort of a lack of interest in the Packers for us? Heavens no. We pay to subscribe to the daily Packers news from the Press-Gazette and Journal-Sentinel, and we’ll be no less informed than we’ve ever been. In fact, we suggest that you subscribe to one or the other to get the Wisconsin coverage you used to get here. We will be attending the Packers-Bears game on Thursday night, and hoped to bring back a batch of photos, but the forecast is for rain, so the good camera will stay back in the Packerville, U.S.A. offices, safe and dry. We’re also watching the process of the 6,700 new seats being built for 2013. The latest thing we read is that 3,800 names will come off the “Green” package waiting list — and we sit at #2,570. Your editor will be 50 in a couple weeks (and has been on the waiting list for 26 years), so we’re looking forward to a couple of decades attending every home game at Lambeau Field.
So, that’s the view from the Editor’s Chair. And now, a visit to the past with someone very few of you will recognize:
