The story behind Richard Huff’s #ferrytales
Richard Huff
For some time now, I’ve been reading Richard Huff’s morning tweets about the “lovebirds” he sees on his daily ferry ride into New York City. On Thursday evening, I dropped the New York Daily News TV editor an email. With your #ferrytales (as Huff calls the tweets), “I feel like I started watching a soap opera long after it debuted and don’t know the back story,” I wrote. “For a post, I wonder if you’d give me (and my readers) a little history of this saga, and what the reaction to it has been.”
On Friday morning, it was announced that Huff is leaving the News to become CBS News executive director of communications. “Well, I won’t hear back from him for a while,” I thought.
I was wrong; Huff send this email on Friday afternoon:
Sorry about the delay in responding. As you might imagine, I was a bit
crazed yesterday.Here it is in a nutshell.
As anyone who commutes for any length of time knows that you find
yourself in the same train, same car, same bus with the same people
every day, though without any contact. It’s like a high school homeroom,
without talking to the people sitting next to you.
What happens in any of those situations is you start picking up on people’s activities, what they read, where they sit, etc. When I was taking the train in, I would write Facebook posts about the transit system, and my fellow riders, where I found something funny. Usually, it’s an observation about a comment or activity.
I switched over to the ferry a year ago and offered similar observations. They might be about the ride, the waves, or the people.
The lovebirds came out of that. Overseeing the activities of folks on my ferry ride in to New York City every day. It’s a love story, of sorts, told in 140 characters at a time. Pure observations and all true. I’m careful not to give revealing details because I’m not here to expose anything and this is all pure fun.
Several folks have suggested a book of some sort, and it’s an idea in the back of my head. If anything, some of these snippets will feed fictional ideas I have down the road.
* Follow @richmhuff on Twitter
* To catch up on #ferrytales, do a page-search for ferrytales on Huff’s All My Tweets page.
