Noel Sheppard was with Newsbusters at its start in 2005, becoming its associate editor. “It must be said that no blogger here was more prolific and more popular. We’ll have more to say in the coming days,” Brent Bozell writes:
Our Noel Sheppard passed away yesterday (Friday) morning at about 5:00 AM. Say a prayer for the soul of a man we’ll all miss professionally, and many, many of us will miss personally as well. Noel was not just a force of nature, he was a very good man.
How quickly this all happened. Just two months ago, Noel wrote about suddenly getting cancer at 53 called “Cancer’s Ray of Hope.” Nine days ago, he wrote us and said he was interested in writing about his “progress” — and he put “progress” in quotes. We were all wishing for better news, and really couldn’t imagine this was a battle that would end this way.
Noel, a fellow financial planner turned new media maven, lived about an hour from me in Northern California, and stopped by my house once in the fall of 2008 to record a segment for PJTV during its rough-and-tumble very early days. The following year, when Walter Cronkite passed away, we recorded this segment of my Silicon Graffiti video blog together, with Noel appearing via Web camera:
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That was in 2009. Never in a million years did I think I would be blogging about Noel’s passing as well, or so quickly afterwards. RIP to a great blogger and media critic.
Update: Much more from Noel’s friends and colleagues at Twitchy.
More: A tribute to Noel from Matthew Sheffield, the creator of Newsbusters.
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