Just Up The Pike News Blog Celebrates 6 Years

Just Up the Pike, a news blog focused on issues in downtown Silver Spring and surrounding areas of Montgomery County, celebrated six years online Tuesday.

Creator Dan Reed started JUTP in 2006 after his bus to work didn't arrive on time and he wrote a blog about it.

Reed dedicates his anniversary post to Kevin Keegan, a journalism teacher who encouraged him when he was a student at Jame Hubert Blake High School.

Reed explains:

Kevin Keegan approached me during my junior year at Blake High School about writing for the Blake Beat, the student paper. I was skeptical at first. I already had ceramics as my elective and was looking forward to honing my skills on the throwing wheel. However, Mr. Keegan suggested that my talents were better spent behind a keyboard, so I enrolled in his class mid-year.

I learned about picas and column inches, interviewing sources and fact-checking, and how to tell a story in 400 words. I absorbed the Blake Beat stylebook and read columns by John Kelly, now a columnist for the Post, from his days in Mr. Keegan's class at Rockville High School in the 1980s.

In the fall of my senior year, I was appointed Opinions Editor and got a regular column. Not only could I write about things that mattered to me, but people actually read and responded to what I wrote, which I still find exhilarating today.

Overall, JUTP has received nearly 6,000 comments and some 800,000 page views, according to Reed.