The Simpson Blog

The radio station is on a roll! We've won another batch of awards. First, the Atlantic Regional RTDNAs, then the Atlantic Journalism Awards. Now we've been honoured at the national RTDNA convention in Toronto, and I'm proud to say my work was involved in both. Here's the piece that won the Short Feature award -- coverage of the royal visit to PEI last summer. Looking through my photos from the trip, I found this cool shot of the girl in the piece reacting after giving the Duchess a bouquet of flowers: I was also at the Halifax Shipyard when Irving was announced as one of the successful bidders in the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy. It was an exciting night, and colleague Amy Arts and I both worked hard to get the story as it happened, and leave behind a lot of good material that contributed to the Best Newscast (Medium Market). Kudos to all my colleagues at News95.7 and across the green-brand chain. Here's the release issued by manageme

I've been a fan. I've been into bands, for example. Bought all their records. Went to their concerts. Learned to play their songs. Collected bootleg recordings. Read the biographies. Kept up on news. Heck, I even made a web site about one of the bands and kept it going for more than a decade after the band broke up. (See www.cubisaband.com for that.) But I've never been obsessed about anything in popular culture. Sure, if you go back into the archives here, you might say I had an unhealthy degree of interest in learning about Scientology and why it was so bad. Sure, I'd lay awake at night imagining conversations with Scientologists and how I could get into their heads and wake them up to reality. But I don't think any of that would even begin to cross over into the realm of clinical obsession . I just get really interested in stuff for a while. Such is not necessarily the case with some people, and some of the things they obsess over would make fine fodder for

Two years ago, Farmers Dairy decided to pull the plug on its formerly-popular juice-flavoured beverage "BEEP". It had been a staple at breakfast tables for half a century, but had lost its nostalgic lustre. People bought the stuff up as fast as they could when word got out in 2010 that Farmers Beep would no longer be produced. Web sites sprang up . YouTube videos were produced. The "End of Beep" story became the most-read story of all time at News957.com . So, when I saw word on Twitter today that Farmers was bringing Beep back for a limited time, I knew we had to get on top of this. I called Farmers Dairy as soon as I could and tried to get an interview. Unfortunately, their communications person was out of town on training. But she called me back anyway and I pushed her to speak with me. What I got was the following interview: Now, I'm a bit on the outside here. Beep was not strictly a Nova Scotian thing, but this seems to have been the last stan

HALIFAX SUNRISE 20120604-0522 , originally uploaded by BigAssSuperBlog . Gorgeous sunrise over Halifax, as seen from the News95.7 control room on the 9th floor of the Young Tower, Young and Robie. As much as I don't adore getting up at 2am to come to work -- and it's a comparatively rare event -- I do appreciate that I've been able to see more sunrises than many people do in a lifetime.