In Joe Romm's footsteps, my biggest mistake

Edited 2012-03-09,14.
A week ago Joe Romm of ClimateProgress ran a blogpost titled Leap Day Special: My Biggest [blogging] Mistakes. Reassessments like this are good policy, so here's mine, singularplural.

Back in the day, I called our hometown newspaper The Union and its management to account on a regular basis.  But over time I dug myself into a rut, and I wish I'd shifted more of that focus toward doing my own reporting (and to those who pointed this out, my retroactive gratitude.)  Plus I did make some ad hominem remarks.   In retrospect I should have flogged my inner editor into greater diligence, and also I should have observed a maxim from Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle, that devoting your focus to someone's else's actions is like letting them live rent-free inside your head.

(I don't think I've criticized The Union in years; these days, such criticism comes primarily from another local blog, although IMO any offenses (of action) by the paper in the last few years have been mighty small potatoes.)

Biggest mistake #2: serving, unwittingly, as an adjuvant.  (Which flowed from mistake #3.)