Karns Quality Blog

I started this blog in 2004 as a experiment.  At that point, I was two years out of college, I had been living in Harrisburg for a year, and I was about to leave for seasonal employment in Oregon.  In a sense, I was all over the place, and I was having difficulty keeping in touch with friends and family.  Karns Quality Blog was born out of this difficulty.  Blogging was still new to me and to the world, and I decided to experiment with it as a means of keeping in touch.

What began as coverage of my adventures in rock climbing and travel slowly evolved over the years as I became more interested in and committed to the Harrisburg community.  Over that same time, I also discovered that my friends and family were not reading my blog with the consistency that I imagined (if they were reading it at all).

As I have explored the communication medium known as blogging, I have also discovered some insights as to what it takes to develop and maintain an audience.  Imperative in that task is staying on topic.  To that end, I have decided to formalize the natural trend that has been occurring around here.  Karns Quality Blog is now officially a blog about Harrisburg written by me Josh Karns, Harrisburg resident and voice of reason.

In formalizing this new format, all this Harrisburg (and Pennsylvania in a broader sense) are fair game.  I will be covering community development, politics, the music scene, special events, oddities, rants and rave, and onward.  I will continue to occasionally publish stories about my rock climbing exploits, especially within the greater Harrisburg region.  Additionally, I will occasionally discuss items of national importance that I feel are particularly relevant or that I believe I have some valuable to share.

I’ve set a goal for myself of four posts a week.  It will be a challenge to meet that, but I believe in setting the bar high.  Many of the posts will probably be photo posts of interesting visuals that I spot around town.  Others will be more textual.  My purpose is not (and never has been) journalistic reporting.  I’ll leave that to The Patriot.  Rather, I will provide analysis, commentary, and opinion on the stories that I see around me.  My goal is to advance discussion, to push the public discourse in directions that I believe will benefit this community.  As always, it will be an experiment.