We have an ongoing series of introducing our readers to members of the Tidelines staff, so that readers can learn a little bit about those staff members. Our first two stories were on Dennis Pescitelli and Veronica L’Allier,
Bill Thomas is well known to readers of Tidelines, as we published a story on him on April 20th, 2015. That story dealt with Bill’s activities as a part of the Charleston Area Justice Ministry. This story will deal with Bill and his many activities with the Tidelines blog.
Bill is a native of Minnesota, having been born and bred there, living in the Twin Cities in his early years. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BS in metallurgical engineering. His first job was with General Electric, a result of a 15 minute on-campus interview with a GE executive. He was given a choice of which of GE’s business lines he would like to do his management training program with and he picked steam turbines. That landed him in GE’s steam turbine manufacturing plant in Ladsen, a suburb of Charleston. He liked the area and although his jobs were never again in South Carolina, he kept coming back to the area and ultimately bought a house in Seabrook and retired here with his wife, Jackie.
Bill started with the blog by helping Dennis Pescitelli with the Sense of Place blog that was done around the annual meeting of the property owners in 2013. When Dennis started Tidelines, he asked Bill to join the team. Like all others joining Tidelines, Bill was unfamiliar with what a blog was. However he knew that Seabrook opinion surveys showed that Seabrookers wanted more information on what was going on in the area, so he felt a blog might answer that information need.
As his role as a Tidelines Editor has unfurled, Bill has played a large role in helping Tidelines establish their operating rules and procedures. Most people are unaware of the many policies Tidelines has had to develop to keep the blog going. All Tidelines team members participate in the development of policies, and Bill has contributed significantly to that process. For example, there are many policies regulating the blog itself, such as blog posting procedures, standards for posting comments, guidelines for posting blog submittals, working with videos on the blog and posting photos from iphones. However, the trickier ones are policies on what are acceptable politically oriented announcements and what the policy should be on advertising charity events. The most recent proposal under consideration is having a letters to the editor addition to Tidelines and Bill has been one of the team getting the data on procedures newspapers use to guide them in posting letters to the editor.
Besides his Tidelines activities, Bill has been active in the past on the SIPOA General Operating Maintenance and Planning Committees, as well as in the Exchange Club. He is avid tennis player as well as a part time fisherman, kayaker and bicyclist.
Bill says he is very proud of what Tidelines has accomplished thus far. He feels he wants to keep up with the latest technology affecting blogs so Tidelines can always bring you the latest news in the best possible format.
We are lucky to have people like Bill contribute so much of their time to make Tidelines all it is today.
Barbara Burgess
Tidelines Staff Writer