So you want to know why News Writer is now Nunzia Rider. Or maybe you don’t. You know I’m gonna tell you anyway, so either keep reading or check out one of the other great posts here at AWOP until I’m done.

See, once upon a time, a little girl was born in the foothills of Appalachia. That’s to mean, not in the actual Appalachian mountains, but in the foothills at their base, which is no less Appalachia than the mountains themselves.

This little girl never did quite fit in. No need to go into detail. Suffice it to say she just didn’t see the world the way her fellow Appalachians did. Maybe it was because she learned to read at 3, or maybe she was changeling. Nobody knows why, it just was.

But it was good.

The little girl grew up playing in the hills and streams around her home, or hanging out at the garage where her dad was a mechanic. Dirty work, that. Greasy oil under the fingernails and all, much harder to get off the skin than the mud and such she got out by the creek.

Anyway, she went to high school and then to college, but amazingly, the girl with the scholarship dropped out. She thought it was boring, all those chemistry and biology lectures she had absolutely no interest in. And besides, it was much for fun playing in the hills and streams around the small college town.

It was still good.

But she was about to leave small town life behind and move to the Big City, where she did a little bit of everything, from living on the streets to coming out, which explained a lot.

She played guitar and sang, performing in several bands along the way, including an all-lesbian rock-n-roll band that might’ve hit the big time if only they’d agreed to tone down their lyrics.

And that was real good.

Accidentally, the little Appalachian girl became a journalist, working her way up the ranks to a pretty large media machine, where she is now a thorn in her boss’ sides. She even has the ear of the company president, on occasion, and they enjoy a spirited communication about the state of journalism in general and of the company in particular.

That was pretty damn good for little Appalachian girl.

But that was not enough, so she started blogging, calling herself the News Writer since, at the time, that’s what she did. Eventually she found her way to AWOP, where she was introduced to a plethora of fantastic writers who thought much as she did.

And, the News Writer was introduced to social media. Everything went well until she tried to sign up with Facebook, which for some odd reason didn’t think News Writer was a real name.

What do to?

Well, she thought and thought and finally decided to try sound-alikes. First try was a success — Facebook was fine with Rider as a surname. But it still wouldn’t accept News.

More thinking ensued, a dangerous proposition, and finally NW found Nunzia — from the Latin, nunzio, which means to announce or to report.

Duh. That fit pretty well, and Nunzia Rider was born. But only on Facebook.

And it was good, at least for a while. But last week, something happened to change that. The Campaign for America’s Future picked up one of NW’s posts for its Voices section on the front page and even sent it out in its evening e-mail.

Fucking fantasically good.

Newsy was thrilled, to say the least, but something bothered her. Seeing “News Writer” there with Robert Reich and Paul Krugman and Steve Benen and Simon Johnson made her feel, well, weird. She wanted a name.

Fortunately, she already had one — at Facebook. So she asked the Boss if she should be Nunzia Rider everywhere, and Kim said, “Yeah.”

And there you have it. How News Writer became Nunzia Rider.

And it was good.

Publisher’s Note:

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