I’ve never met Frank Walker, but I owe him a lot.
In March of 2014, I had never heard of Pewsitter. All of a sudden, though, people started telling me that they had linked to something on my personal blog, when 1P5 was still just a tickle in the back of my brain. Sure enough, the traffic came rolling in. Then I got a note through my site contact form from a guy named Frank Walker:
Thank you Steve for your wonderful article. We’ve headlined with it tonight. Sometimes a think piece is an event. You’ve been indispensable in the past year. God bless you.
-Frank
PewSitter
So began a correspondence that has spanned over two years and who knows how many links. If I had a story that was big and needed to get out, I would always send it to Frank first. Often enough, he’d politely reply that it was already up on their home page. More times than I can count, 1P5 stories sat there with the big Drudge Report-esque headline and the big Drudge Report-esque picture, dominating the big Drudge Report-esque front page of Pewsitter. Since August 1, 2014, Pewsitter links have initiated 71,378 new “sessions” on 1P5, according to Google.
In other words: Frank Walker helped build 1P5. Day in and day out, he drove traffic to our door. He put a permanent link on the Pewsitter homepage.
And then, at the end of March of this year, he sent me a note: “Starting in May I’m no longer going to post PewSitter.” But it wasn’t the end. “I’m planning to launch a new site in June,” he said, “but I haven’t made any announcement yet.”
Well, quietly, earlier this month, Canon212.com was launched, with Frank Walker at the helm. Canon212.com should look familiar – it’s a news aggregation site in a Drudge Report-esque style. In a Pewsitter-esque style. But whereas Pewsitter (which still regularly links to our stories) has taken on a more American political overtone in addition to Church news, Canon212.com has that unmistakable Frank Walker style. As of this writing, the front page is emblazened with a story I’m going to need to cover tomorrow (and have touched on before):
This is not a paid advertisement. Nobody sent me a check in the mail. In fact, Frank didn’t even ask me to do this. I asked him. I don’t make recommendations of other sites here often, if ever. I certainly don’t do it lightly. But Frank has a nose for news, and he finds all the most important stories Catholics awake in a time of crisis need to read. I’m going to do podcast with him soon, because I want to know what makes him tick. How he finds the stories that matter. How he spends his days reading all this stuff and isn’t guilty of substance abuse. Hopefully, we’ll get that scheduled soon.
Until then: if you haven’t bookmarked Canon212.com, what are you waiting for?
