Pop-Break’s Third Anniversary — An Open Letter to the Staff

pop-break editor-in-chief bill bodkin looks back at three years and salutes his staff …

Three years.

It really amazes me that three years ago I sat in my apartment in Sea Girt, N.J., and hit the publish button on what was then known as the B&B Entertainment Blog. The site’s mission was simple: for longtime friends and journalists Bill Bodkin and Brent Johnson to write about pop culture, a subject we both loved and dearly missed as our jobs did not require us to wax poetic about the lyrical virtues of The Beatles or review the latest action flick. Neither one of us ever thought that this two person WordPress blog would become a site that’s been read well over 870,000 times by people all over the world — that we’d have interviewed the people we have or we’d have attended the events we’ve attended or we’d be producing concerts in Asbury Park.

So, I’m here today, on our third anniversary, to tell you that even though we never thought this would happen, in the depths of my soul I always hoped it would happen.

See, Pop-Break to me is a recreation of one of the best times of my journalistic career — running Inside Beat, the weekly entertainment magazine of The Daily Targum at Rutgers University. Since I left that publication in early 2004, there was a part of me that yearned to recreate the camaraderie, the passion, the enthusiasm and the creativity that leapt off those printed pages. It was such an amazing time and the reason for it — the collaboration with a brilliant staff. I missed those days of working as a team, fielding ideas and discovering new pop culture nuggets from my staff.

And on today, our three year anniversary of Pop-Break, I look at the staff of wonderfully talented, dedicated, passionate and amazing writers we have and I realize that it’s these people who have turned Pop-Break into what it is today and they, most likely unbeknownst to them, have helped me fulfill a dream I’d never see come to fruition.

And it is in this anniversary piece I’d like to personally salute my staff for their hard work, dedication and sheer awesomeness.

I could fill up pages thanking each of you for what you’ve done for the site. Working for absolutely no pay, outside the occasional cool interview or free concert tickets, I marvel at how you come through for this site. Every day, I pour over this site and my heart swells with pride as I know that each word you write pushes us one step closer to what could be a most fortuitous future.

But future aspirations aside, what you’ve done for this site has helped me in so many ways. It has restored confidence in a man who had none, it’s lifted my heart during my darkest of times and it has created new friendships and everlasting memories and bonds that I’ll always cherish. You’ve helped me realize a dream that I only thought was a flight of fancy, mere wishful thinking.

So to Brent Johnson, Jason Kundrath, Logan J. Fowler, Joe Zorzi, Maxwell Barna, Jason Stives, Daniel Cohen, Molly & Colleen Hurford, Ann Hale, Jeanne Crump, Lauren Stern, Kimberlee Rossi-Fuchs, Michael Dworkis, Lisa Pikaard, John Elliott, Eric Batchelor, Kelly Gonsalves, Erin Petrie, and to all those who’ve contributed and written for us in the past and are just beginning their contributions now — from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you for pushing me to become a better writer, editor, photographer, concert promoter, boss and most importantly a better person.

Thank you for being on this wild ride with me to this point. Stay on board. My hopes are for nothing but bigger and better in the year to come.