Not long after I told the Northern Kentucky Tribune that I could no longer write for the site, the publisher deleted all of the 32 stories that I wrote between Jan. 5 and March 4, 2026. I had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I was relieved that the blog had erased my affiliation with it. On the other, I worried about the ethical implications of deleting news stories in a community that lacks reliable news sources.
Because the internet makes everything evergreen, there’s really no such thing as complete erasure. The site’s curious editing and content management will survive as long as Google and the Internet Archive, I suppose.
The embarrassment is something I can embrace, though, like my look back on the stint I had in graduate school as a columnist for the Atlantic City Press. Casino lounge acts comprised my beat and my stories were published in the “Loungin’ Around” column. Yes readers, I was a paid lounge lizard.
I doubt that I’ll ever laugh much about the Northern Kentucky site’s struggle to correctly spell my name or its prioritization of press releases over reporting the news. But, its losing battle with WordPress tags may be the saving grace. Website tags are intended to facilitate easy indexing for search engines. They are a lot like library catalog subjects — well-conceived terms to make content easy to find for everyone from consumers to academic researchers.
Some of the more memorable and hilarious tags that the Northern Kentucky Tribune attached to my stories included:
- part two of series
- investment in crafting the local ordinance
- larger location
- water in the underground tunnels
- business as usual
- long history
- new chapter
And, there were the many spelling errors included among the tags. Among them, my last name (spelled Rottenstein), “transperency,” and “walkour.” Unless someone is researching misspelled words and the people who produce them, the tags are completely useless.
A couple of my favorites deserved screenshots:
The “History Sidebar” is more than a decade old. Perhaps I should change the title to the “Shrouded in Secrecy Archives.”