The progression of our class guests have led us down quite a winding road. We've had our hard-core reporters turned editors. Visitors abounding with story telling talents, with flecks of poetry disseminated into their prose. Writers writing for a demographic and writers writing for an audience of one. Realists, comedians, awareness of confidence and admission of insecurities.
Then Mr. Thelen throws a monkey wrench into the equation. I wondered, how does a movie critic even begin to fit into the bunch?
Well even though I never got the chance to meet him up close and personal, I didn't have to google his name all that long to realize that Bob Ross is a tenacious, hardworking man in media who is making a way for himself.
Like most of our guests, he was a reporter. But he didn't transition into the more predictable news occupations such as an editorial writer or a columnist.
He pursued his passion of pop culture and became a movie critic. After an expansive 22-year career at the Tampa Tribune, he got the ax in April 2007.
What I am most impressed about with Ross, is his life, post Tampa Tribune.
He didn't take the news lying down.
Candid and vulnerable, he shared the blow of his job loss.
"Sure I'm hurt," he wrote in the Sticks of Fire Blog, but in he went on to say that life goes on and he announced that he would be posting his movie reviews on that blog. Although he was new to the blogging world, as he mentions, that didn't stop him from putting his craft to use. Many of his reviews got quite a few dozen comments and eventually he created his own self titled website.
Chocked full of multimedia applications and interactive features, Ross is ready to fight for his crown as the Movie Boss.
He has written reviews as well as created videos of himself discussing films with clips of pertinent movie scenes edited in between his comments. With a Google Ad on running on his website, it appears that he is getting his piece off the on-line revenue pie. He also has the freedom to do exciting and fulfilling free lance work. Not even a month ago, he joined the local Tampa Fox affiliate in making his predictions for the 2009 Oscar winners.
Alas, we have evidence to confirm was the others have been telling us all along: Us writers can land on our feet if we take advantage of the changing media around us.
Ross, older in age, and vibrant in spirit, is a great inspiration in the dismal humdrum of gloom and doom. If he can do it, so can we.
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