Winning the Streetsie for Journalist of the year is a great honor that I’m still trying to process.

Over the past few days, I’ve gotten a number of emails from supporters both familiar and internet acquaintances contributing to part of this process.

This shows how great and expansive the cycling community is.

The real honor with the Streetsie isn’t from winning, but just being in consideration.

Being mentioned in the same category with others who do fantastic work has provided me with the most significant context of the work I do.

With internet voting being a component of the judging criteria, I knew anything could happen.

On one side, you can see it as a popularity contest which can take away from merit.

At this time last year, John Scott was a fringe hockey player that was toiling between NHL rosters and the minors.

Someone decided it would be cool to get him into the NHL All-Star Game, so an online movement started to vote him in as a write in candidate.

Not only did he make it in, but he won the game’s MVP which was determined by….internet voting.

 

I hope I’m not the John Scott of internet blogging, but I will take that paycheck.

 

After that, he only got to play in one NHL game ever again.

So after a bump from some LACBC promotion, my lead increased by seven times giving me 77% of all the votes which sounded a bit unrealistic.

I had a ton of friends and followers who messaged me about their support, but seven hundred votes even had me question the integrity of it all.

On the other hand, there seemed to be other categories where candidates received an even larger robo-bump, but did not win after staff consideration, so that makes this feel legit.

Either way, I’m still going on writing the blog the same way I always do.

This isn’t my primary job, so finding time to create an overarching direction with my work is just as difficult as it always is.

My gain goal is to pump sunshine into the cycling community and when the time comes, to do a little finger pointing as well.

And I try to mix in a fart joke here and there.

And will CiclaValley come out of hiding?

 

If anything, I hope this makes people more aware of the great work that is done over at Streetsblog LA.

I read every article that Joe, Sahra and Damien write.

They all go the extra derivative on the depth of their work so that I learn about the issues behind the issues.

Reading their articles makes me feel like I’m gaining an education. (Full disclosure: I did give Joe a CiclaValley t-shirt a couple of years ago)

Thanks again to Streetsblog LA and all my supporters who got me here.

I hope to keep the momentum going in 2017 and continue covering all things cycling.

And poop.