SooToday.com News Director says farewell

It is with mixed feelings that SooToday.com received and now shares news of its News Director, David Helwig.

Helwig has decided to leave SooToday.com to pursue more creative endeavours.

While we will greatly miss the unique character and colour he imprinted on the site during the ten years he directed it, we are glad for his well-deserved change of focus and wish him well in his future projects.

Helwig tells us he will be taking time to pursue his other, non-SooToday.com-related life's passions, which include non-fiction writing as well as education and film production.

Also, he'll finally have a few hours a day without a ringing phone to write his beloved opera libretto.

While some readers may be surprised at the depth and variety of Helwig's interests, we at SooToday.com learned long ago to expect the unexpected from him.

We also learned much of the fine art of headline writing, copy editing and the intricate processes involved in deciding what should run when there are choices to be made.

He is an award-winning journalist, a born teacher and a compassionate, humble human being who freely shared his vast knowledge with staff at SooToday.com.

In February 2002, Helwig came to Sault Ste. Marie to launch the SooToday.com website as a news site.

He built the site from the ground up starting with a batch of business cards, a small point-and-shoot digital camera and a laptop.

Often showing up where other reporters feared or neglected to go, he became the nomadic news guy around town with a bunch of things hanging off his neck who covered all sorts of stories.

Readers began to expect the unexpected and came back looking for more.

On his Facebook page he describes himself as a media strategist, editor, essayist, screenwriter, film producer, fight choreographer and photographer.

"Most of my time in recent years has been spent launching new media products and coaching/mentoring developing writers," he says. "I am also an aspiring librettist."

Because of Helwig, SooToday.com is what it is today and we will strive to continue to be a high-quality and independent news site with an incorrigible sense of humour.

Where next Helwig will be found is anyone's guess, but where ever it is he will leave it a better place than he found it, as he has SooToday.com.

We at SooToday.com wish him well in his adventures and thank him sincerely for the charm, character and integrity he brought to the site.

Dave Helwig is pictured above with his beloved grandson, Emerson, the cutie that garnered world wide attention when Mommy sneezed.