Mark Moves On

Now here is some news I take no joy in reporting.

Mark Spivey, who covered Plainfield since June 2008, is leaving journalism for a new venture, as yet unannounced.

He broke the news on Facebook with this post:

It's official. A week from tomorrow will mark probably my final day of ever again working as a journalist. I was humbled and honored by the experience of doing just that over the last decade, because it showed me the world for what it really is and stripped away so many misconceptions and flawed presumptions I once had about the way things actually work. But it's time to move on.

Mark was the fourth person to cover Plainfield after I retired in 2003. Chad Weihrauch was the first, for about three years. Christa Segalini had a brief tenure and then Brandon Lausch took over. Mark very quickly got to know Plainfield and its various communities, and many regarded him as a friend as well as a journalist. He racked up awards as fast as compliments from readers. When the Courier News appeared to shift from beat coverage to a more general approach to news gathering, people missed him at meetings.

Now, as Chad, Christa, Brandon and many others have done, he is leaving journalism. To his credit, it is on his own terms. Other colleagues, as recently as this month, were just shown the door after many years of service.

Perhaps his biggest story out of Plainfield was one he pursued over years, the Connolly Properties saga that began with complaints about a broken elevator in one of the company's 26 apartment buildings and ended with David Connolly facing nine years in prison for a $20 million Ponzi scheme affecting more than 100 investors. Mark has also become known as an expert on beer, but when I ran into him recently in Plainfield, we talked about birds. He is an ornithologist at heart, I think, but hey, you can drink beer while bird-watching, so it all works out.

Let's wish Mark all the best and say au revoir, not farewell, just in case he will be working somewhere close by ...

--Bernice