A really cool idea, or two

"Do you know what would be really cool?"
These words from Mercury reporter Brandie Kessler were usually followed by:
"I know you probably don't want to do this, and you can say this is a dumb idea -- you're the boss, you do what you want, but I was just thinking wouldn't it be cool if ..."
A soliloquy along those lines preceded a number of really cool ideas that we have embraced at The Mercury and turned to successes for this newspaper and the community of the Pottstown area.
We collected more than 16,000 food items for area food pantries and nearly 1,000 containers of laundry detergent by joining efforts with TownSquare bloggers to spread the word about dwindling food supplies last winter.
Cool idea.
We created a Pinterest board of Most Wanted criminals in area police departments, getting pictures out to the public on a platform they use. Tips have led to arrests, which make police happy and make us proud.
Cool idea.
We are posting cards with donors' names to Operation Holiday on the window of The Mercury Community Media Lab as a colorful display and a thank you to the readers who send us thousands of dollars for our holiday giving program.
Another cool idea.
Brandie's coolest idea, at least in her mind, was raising money for the Pottstown Relay for Life by taking donations to pie a Mercury employee in the face at the Bark for Life event. The 2008 collection raised $2,700 and gave Brandie the opportunity to throw a banana cream pie in my face.

 I have had some cool ideas for Brandie, as well. One of them was sending her on the river with the Schuylkill River Sojourn last summer to live-blog four days of the river journey, traveling in her kayak, tweeting and taking video along the way.

Dedicated police reporter that she is, she fought me on leaving the office for a week to enjoy the outdoors.
I prevailed, and the blog was a gem.
Another idea I recently had was that she apply for a reporting job at our larger sister paper, the York Daily Record/Sunday News. I had learned about the job from colleagues at York, and I told her it was an opportunity she should not pass up. At least go for the interview, I insisted.
Again, the retorts that there are too many stories in Pottstown still to write, too much work still to be done.
But she went, and the rest, as they say, is history. Sunday was her last official day at The Mercury. She stopped in Monday though and I expect to see her again this week.
Brandie is one of a kind.
Her passion for reporting, her dedication to this craft, her persistence for excellence and her fearsome loyalty to her colleagues and others around her is unmatched.
That's why we already miss her.

There's a warning here, too, for our friends at YDR: Get ready for cool ideas.
And watch out.
You could end up with banana cream on your face. 

Sharing mothers' smiles

When holidays like Mother's Day are approaching, we typically brainstorm ideas for stories, features and photos that will involve our readers and provide something interesting for both print and online editions. We're particularly conscious of our readers' engagement with social media, and we look to how people are using Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest for ideas.

This year, online editor Eileen Faust noted that one of her sisters often posts a picture of their Mom as her Facebook status picture on Mother's Day. Following that idea, we decided to ask readers to send us pictures of their moms. We're compiling them for a full page in print on Sunday; we've created a Pinterest board, and they're also appearing on our Facebook page.

I was immediately jealous of the pictures my co-workers were able to share of themselves with their mothers. First of all, it will be 10 years in August since my mother died, and I miss her every day. Seeing photos of daughters and moms laughing together -- at family picnics, a Phillies game, children's birthday parties, dinners together -- just makes me miss her more.

It's not that I was robbed of a full life with my mother; she was 86, and I was 48 when she died. But there's never a milestone in life or a precious moment that I don't want to share with my Mom. That's just the way it is.

And if seeing my younger co-workers with their mothers wasn't enough age-envy, there's the technology gap. I don't have any digital photos of my Mom, and I don't have many print photos of just the two of us. Once I was married and a mother, it seems all the pictures we took were my Mom and the kids.

So I ended up with these two pictures. One is a Mother's Day photo of me and my mother, circa 1980. It wouldn't require time-advancing photo techniques to illustrate how much I would age in resemblance of her. Any current photo of me will prove the truth of what so many people who knew her tell me.

The other photo of my Mom was taken at a birthday party for her at my brother's house -- it is a picture of my mother laughing. It satisfies the other longing because it brings her to life.


Sunday's Living front will feature the photos of many moms submitted by our readers. When we brainstormed how to feature Mother's Day, we settled on inviting readers to share their mothers' smiles. Because these are the images that live forever, even when mothers are gone.