Farewell From the Staff of safedrinkingwater NEWS

It is with a great deal of sadness that I report to you, our loyal readers, that safedrinkingwater NEWS will cease publication. Many of you have been with us since November of 2000 when McGuire Environmental Consultants, Inc., published the first issue. On August 1, 2008, we transitioned from ownership by Malcolm Pirnie, Inc., to a new corporate entity, Safedrinking Water NEWS, Inc. Our goal was to increase readership significantly and use advertising to generate enough revenue to enable us to continue serving the drinking water quality community. After much hard work by everyone involved, we have come to the conclusion that our business model is not working. Now that I understand it will not be economically possible to become self-supporting, I want to stop publication before actually selling a bunch of ads to our supporters.

Along with the NEWS, our companion job placement service, JobReservoir, will also cease operation. Both websites will remain alive in their current, static form for at least the next 10 months, and in the world of the internet, nothing ever really dies.

I am very grateful to Jennifer Smith, Chet Anderson, and Erica Rosen for their hard work and support over the years. Jonathan Valdez also provided a tremendous service to us as an editor and technical guru prior to our change in ownership on August 1, 2008.

If any of our readers are interested, or know of an entity that might be interested, in acquiring the assets of the newsletter and job placement site and continuing this effort, we would like to hear from you. I am in the process of contacting several possible new owners to see if they are interested.

Thank you all for the past eight years. It has been a pleasure. If you wish to provide any feedback to me or discuss the future of the newsletter, contact me at: safedrinkingwaternews@yahoo.com.  

Michael J. McGuire
Publisher
safedrinkingwaternews@yahoo.com

To quote those "great full Dead" philosophers of safe water and good music: "What a long, strange trip it's been!"  But it has also been an interesting and rewarding journey.

In 400 issues of the NEWS (and 18 alerts), there have been lots of lights - high and low, including:

• Our very first "Alert" featured a new arsenic MCL which was derailed by the then-new Bush administration, and, finally, came the really, really actual new MCL.
• With the recent flurry of hyper-press about PPCPs in drinking water, we were alerting readers to an important USGS study in 2002.
• We recognized the clever efforts of water utilities from Bryant, TX, and Sweetwater, CA, to get their consumers to be confident in their water quality or, at least, to pay attention.
• We provided detailed coverage and analysis of a plethora of waterborne outbreaks, from an early, bizarre Crypto problem in Canada to the recent perplexing Salmonellosis outbreak in Colorado.
• We kept our readers tuned in to health-effects research (and the concomitant flurry of controversy) related to a variety of contaminants, such as hexavalent chromium and perchlorate (both of which continue to be important).

We have tried hard to bring you the important breaking news about drinking water quality from a wide spectrum of sources and to provide insight into the issues spotlighted in the news. And we have tried to make the news readable and enjoyable by using humor to point out the contradictions, the extremes, and the just plain silly-season antics of those from all compass points of the water world.

We loved your generous compliments, appreciated the helpful criticisms, acknowledged our occasional errors gently pointed out by readers, and we cherish the new friendships nurtured by working together, by contacts to get the back stories, and by hearing from folks literally from around the world.

There will be a hole in each of our lives. But, we will fill it: Jennifer with keeping track of her first-born matriculating 2000 miles away in the Republican stronghold of Berkeley, CA; Erica with planning matrimonial activity from her seat at Fenway as our beloved BoSox advance; Mike with getting a new RO system functioning in his boat, etc; and me... maybe I'll try to figure out this retirement thing? Not!

Chet Anderson
(The very) Senior Editor
mendochet@mcn.org

Thank You!

It has been a complete pleasure to pull the NEWS together each week. I have loved this job and the amazing team we have. Each week the NEWS has started in a small office in my home in Austin, TX.  I sent drafts of the NEWS to the Northern California coastline town of Mendocino, where Chet overlooked the Pacific Ocean as he worked his editorial magic—the greatest commentaries ever. When Chet and I were done, the NEWS zoomed over to Boston, MA, where the wonderful Erica cleaned it up and made it readable in the technical sense. Finally, Mike and Jonathan, in Los Angeles, gave a last look before it ended up in your email inbox. Quite a journey!

Over the past eight years we have tried, by bringing the very latest updates, to help water managers, state and federal regulators, scientists and researchers, operators, community activists, local representatives, and interested public understand the complexities of making sure tap water is safe to drink. We have watched water systems nationwide learn how to handle emerging contaminants like MTBE, NDMA, chromium, and others. We have seen communities worldwide debate the merits of fluoridation, observed the growth of desalination, the fall of bottled water and the appearance of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in drinking water. I hope that the NEWS has been a good resource for all of you.

Thanks for a great eight years! 

Jennifer Smith
Managing Editor