About Bob Dunn
I’m a writer with a web technology background and the genes of a farmer, living with my wife and two young children on something less than an acre of South Texas land bumping up against the Brazos River in Richmond, Texas.
I grew up in Ohio, where most of my family remains, and settled here after spending a couple of decades as a newspaper nomad, which is also how I met my wife. I’ve served as reporter on most of the news beats, as business editor, opinion columnist and, the most fun, editor for computer-assisted reporting.
In the late ’90s, when it became apparent to me newspapers were going away and never coming back, I was fortunate enough to find work on a series of interesting Internet-related ventures, some of which involved newsgathering. I headed up a database applications company for awhile, but missed the excitement (and conveniently forgot about the drudge and stress) of the news business.
By this time my wife and I had abandoned what was (for me) the claustrophobic confines of Houston in favor of Fort Bend County to the south – a mixture of vast suburban developments and pockets of semi-rural space, some of the latter of which we began occupying. Finding myself in a rapidly growing county of 500,000 people with no dominant media outlet, I felt compelled to see whether one or two people could provide a public service by breaking local news stories on the web as quickly as possible as they occurred in real life. The result, in 2005, was FortBendNow.
After a few months and a very modest marketing effort, the site became popular enough that it attracted several thousand regular readers. But I wasn’t able to make much of a living at it; chasing news all day left little time to sell advertising. In late 2007, I sold FortBendNow to a group with three other similar sites and plans to open more. They needed someone to provide news reporting in Fort Bend County, and Lord knows I have developed some experience in that area. So I now work for the company I once started, doing something very similar to what I did during my first newspaper job in 1979 – reporting on county government, education issues, crime, business, environmental issues and anything else that captures my attention in Fort Bend County, Texas.
But that’s all work. I much prefer spending my time with my family – three terrific grown children in addition to my also terrific but younger kids, and of course my terrific wife.
In between family and work, you might find me growing fruit, vegetables and odd tropical plants here on our One Acre Ranch and, occasionally, smoking a chicken.
You can contact me here via email.
→ B.Dunn, Dec 09, 2008, 11 41 am
