One of the best things about writing a daily blog is you can pour out your heart, express your frustrations, confess your weaknesses and occasionally, when you’re in the mood, embarrass your family.
 

You can talk about your son’s piano lessons, your daughter’s new bed and your sister’s old boyfriend, and not get fired.
 

“Just, whatever you do, can you leave me out of it?” my daughter Amanda begged tonight as I ran a made-up quote by her. “I think you need to keep your personal and professional lives separate.”
 

“But I don’t have a professional life,” I reminded her, which is about when she ran away from me trailed by her little brother, who was afraid I would follow up the piano lesson blog with an inspired piece about his tuba.
 

As a professional newspaper reporter, writing about women I observed in restaurants not wearing pants was not encouraged. Neither was writing about my loss of memory, naked men or my co-ed softball team.
 

I think that must be why I have written with more frequency and more joy in the last three months than I had in a long while. If I could make a living at this, I’d be the happiest woman in the world.
 

Not that I am not happy writing sports. I am. After a few months of seriously wondering whether I would ever return to sportswriting, I am happy to report that in writing about women in restaurants without pants, I have also re-discovered how much I truly enjoy being a sportswriter in my new duties for ESPN.
 

If I hadn’t returned to sports, I may have forgotten all those off-hand remarks people make when you interview them that never quite find their way into your stories because they just don’t fit, but that never quite leave you either.
 

Like when you’re finished talking to Cubs manager Lou Piniella about Ryan Dempster and the pitcher’s infant daughter’s health crisis, the interview is finished and Piniella slowly shakes his head.
 

“You don’t get it back,” he says quietly, talking in general about how the baseball culture has changed from the days when he was allowed a day off for the birth of only one of his three children. “Kids don’t forget about not being there for their birthdays and mothers don’t forget about not being there for their babies.”
 

Or when you’re sitting in the dugout one morning waiting out a blinding rainstorm with Dempster and your sportscaster friend Peggy Kusinski, and it’s just the three of you, three parents, talking about how much you love your kids.
 

“You know that movie “Taken?” says Dempster, whose baby is still in the hospital at this point, still with a tracheal tube because she is unable to swallow on her own some three months after her birth.
 

Peggy and I nod, though I doubt she knows the movie any better than I do.
 

“Liam Neeson is in France looking for his daughter,” Dempster tells us, “and the chief of police there says, ‘I’d help you but you’re tearing down the city.’ And Liam Niesen looks at him and says, ‘I’d tear down the Eiffel Tower to save my daughter,’ and that’s the way I feel about this. I’ve always felt that way about my son but seeing my daughter sick and in bed and going through this, I’ll do whatever I have to. I just want to get her better.”
 

It was for the same story that I spoke to White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, who as always delivered with comments uniquely Ozzie. But then you turn off your tape recorder and he adds:
 

“The only thing in life you have is your kids. As soon as you leave this game, they’ll remember you when you die and if you ever go to the Hall of Fame. The only time they bring you back here is if they can make some money. But when you talk about your kids, that’s the only thing that’s really yours. Your wife, your mom, they’re not yours. If one of my kids gets sick, [screw] baseball, I’ll go be with them.”
 

Those are the best moments, even when you can’t always work them into print.
 

And that’s why I love my blog, because I just did.

We were between innings at my son’s baseball game, yesterday. When he was younger, and the kid playing catcher needed half the team to help put back on the equipment, you could basically run home, have a snack, come back and not miss a moment of action.
 
Now that Alec is 11, it has been cut down considerably. But there was still enough time for a glance at my Blackberry and the e-mail that had come in from an unfamiliar address.
 

Michael Conroy, a former journalist, and for the past nine years an English teacher and school newspaper adviser at my alma mater, Niles West High School in Skokie, Ill., was writing to tell me that he had watched my interview by John Callaway on WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight” last Friday, and that a mutual friend thought I might be interested in what he had written in his latest blog.
 

He called it “A journalistic epiphany” and it took me the next couple innings to recover from it.
 

Conroy wrote (http://mgc1237.squarespace.com) that for the past two or three years, he had been vaguely dissatisfied with his job, but didn’t know why. He liked the school and the kids but he had lost his sense of passion.
 

Then a few months ago, he decided that after next year he would step down from teaching kids journalism and photojournalism, and heading up the school paper, something he wrote would once have been “unthinkable.”
 

While he felt somewhat satisfied with his decision, he still couldn’t quite figure out why, after working as a publications adviser for 19 of his 32 years since college and being a former newspaperman himself, he was moved to do it.
 

And then, he wrote, he watched “Chicago Tonight.”
 

“I am not being hyperbolic,” Conroy wrote, “when I say that a tear slipped down my cheek as I listened to [Isaacson’s] account of being given a complimentary press credential at the United Center, the halls of which she roamed with impunity for most of her career, so that she could bid farewell to fellow journalists, Center employees, Bulls and Blackhawks staffers, etc.  I was moved beyond words by the pain in her eyes, the catch in her throat as she related her the specifics of her dismissal, and the resigned slump of her shoulders that suggested that she doesn’t expect to work for a newpaper ever again.
 

“Watching her heart-wrenching interview with Callaway brought home to me the reason why teaching journalism and producing a student newspaper no longer bring me any joy:  teaching journalism has become a discrete task, somewhat like instructing students in the rudiments of the five-paragraph theme (which I loathe) or preparing students for standardized testing (which makes me cringe).
 

“Isaacson’s situation and that of two of my former editors (one of whom will head to graduate school after leaving the Charlotte Observer one step ahead of the pink slip and the other who is hanging by his fingernails onto his sports writing gig at a Texas daily) make me realize that I can no longer in good conscience or good humor prepare my students for a profession in which, chances are, they never will find employment.
 

“Teaching is challenging (and often frustrating) enough when teachers actually feel that they are making a difference.  It is almost intolerable when it becomes an exercise in futility.  . . . ”
 

It was not the first time I have thought about this. In recent years, as I have continued to talk to journalism students who have called or e-mailed, or in classes I have visited at Columbia College in Chicago or DePaul or Northwestern, I have wondered how to advise them.
 

I often ended my talks by saying that I hoped and prayed there would always be a place in the world for the news gatherer and the storyteller. Deep down, I truly thought there always would be.
 

I mean, in whatever medium it happened to be, a free society demands a free press, that news be gathered and reported, that stories be told, whether to inform or to entertain. And if it wasn’t a newspaper, it would be on the Internet or television.
 

But with the downturn of the newspaper industry, I certainly questioned where the future storytellers would come from.
 

With a little bit of research, I found out.
 

It seems college students are not shying away from journalism. Quite the contrary, according to the Columbia Journalism Review and Forbes Magazine, which have reported in the last eight months that despite the thousands of jobs lost in the newspaper industry, enrollment in J-Schools continues to grow. That rather than discourage kids who didn’t grow up reading newspapers anyway, the new crop of digital media jobs, in an almost romantic way, are encouraging students who see that anyone and everyone can be a journalist.
 

Rather than being scared off, the next generation of news gatherers and storytellers believe they can join and create new mediums through which to report, and more freelance opportunities which are already forming the new-look industry.
 

So why am I still worried? I guess because as I join the great blog beyond, I see greater volume, yes, but also less credibility and accountability. Anyone and everyone really can be a journalist.
 

Maybe that’s why I’m worried.