BLOGGER: Natasha ‘Tasha’ Ball

FEATURED BLOG(S): Tasha Does Tulsa

TWITTER: @TashaDoesTulsa (Tasha Does Twitter)

FACEBOOK: Tasha Does Facebook

FLICKR: Tasha Does Tulsa on Flickr

TASHA DOES TULSA

Natasha Ball thinks Tulsa, OK is, well, kind of a big deal, to use the parlance of our times.

Actually, more accurately, Natasha Ball – or, simply Tasha, as her readers know her – thinks Tulsa, OK is the GREATEST CITY IN THE WORLD!

Tasha in Downtown Tulsa, OK

While that may sound pretty audacious to some of us big city dwellers, after reading Tasha Does Tulsa and having a wonderful telephone conversation with Tasha last week, I can honestly say that I have a newfound desire to visit Tulsa, and I’m confident that when I do, I will have an awesome time (and an amazing tour guide!).

TASHA LOVES TULSA

Seriously, though– I don’t think I’ve spoken to many people who are as enthusiastic and genuine in their love for their town or city as Tasha Ball. As a Tulsa native, her love for the city is contagious, exciting, and completely authentic:

“I’ve lived in Tulsa my whole life, except for when I went away to school and a few months here and there that don’t really count. My family has been here since before Oklahoma was a state, before Tulsa was a city.  It’s this huge thing in my life: there is nowhere else.  I have this huge sense of place.  It’s my whole life.”

Ball says she got her first job fresh out of college, right after she moved back to Tulsa and fell in love with the city all over again. She simply walked into the local news office of the Tulsa Business Journal, handed her resume to the editor and said something to the effect of “hire me, please!”

The editor liked her approach so much that he hired her on the spot (get this: she still freelances for the publication today). One of her beats at the paper was tourism, but because the Tulsa Business Journal is a B2B publication, Ball felt she wasn’t getting to proselytize her love for Tulsa in the way that she wanted:

“There’s something about downtown Tulsa right now that’s just magical. There’s a big time revitalization that’s been underway for a while, and there are always new things going on. It’s really easy if you work downtown every day to get on fire about everything that’s happening and to get really excited about it, which is what happened to me.  I would go home and hear my grandmother talk about how she used to ride the trolley to downtown Tulsa to do her Christmas shopping in the snow – I could see the historic aspects of it coming into play and I wanted to tell EVERYBODY about it, but the paper wasn’t really the right platform.”

TASHA BLOGS TULSA

The right platform, it turns out, would be a blog – which is how Tasha Does Tulsa was born:

“I’d just heard this refrain throughout my whole teenage life: ‘Tulsa is a boring, Mid-western city — Tulsa is Fly-over country — anywhere-but-here,’ – and that always kind of teed me off. I never understood why everyone wanted to leave. I wanted to challenge that refrain. I say: if you say Tulsa is boring then you’re probably not looking very closely at what the city has to offer. A couple of coworkers and I were at a bar downtown one night, trying to think of ways I could talk to people about this passion I have for Tulsa and I thought, wow, this would be funny, I’ll start a blog – let’s call it ‘Tasha Does Tulsa,’ – and then everyone agreed and encouraged me to do it.”

She started slowly, but when she got pregnant with her first child, Ball found the time to get serious about blogging. Today she spends approximately 20 hours per week on blog-related activities.

TASHA KNOWS TULSA

When she’s not blogging, Ball is a full-time mom as well as a freelance writer. She writes regularly for both the Tulsa Business Journal (as their food and entertainment writer), as well as for Oklahoma Magazine (FACT: she landed that gig after meeting the magazine’s publisher at a social media panel where she was speaking on behalf of her blog).

Clearly, Ball’s love for Tulsa is not an unrequited one – not only is she an award-winning blogger and regular freelance writer, but she’s also a weekly staple on KRMG talk radio each Friday morning. Keeping busy is just one of the by-products of being a successful blogger and freelancer, Ball says, adding that meeting interesting Oklahomans and Tulsans is one of the highlights of hyperlocal blogging:

“The people I have met because of blogging—that part has been absolutely incredible. I love getting to know people who are passionate about our city. Since it has improved – I hate to say ‘improved,’ because Tulsa has always been a really cool, weird little place anyway— people want to make it their own by starting new projects and putting their stamp on the city. I’ve gotten to meet a lot of people like that.”

For instance, Ball recently helped to found the Tulsa Blogger Meet-Up, which is in its fourth month. She says they usually invite a speaker, and then she and the rest of Tulsa’s top bloggers meet at an independently-owned Tulsa restaurant to drink beer and talk blogging:

“When you write a local blog, it tends to get you out of the house a lot. Naturally, I normally like to sit at home on my butt, but blogging makes me practice what I preach: getting out and about in Tulsa. I’ve discovered all kinds of really neat, on-the-inside-track things. Things my parents and grandparents didn’t know about – and I get to share it with people. Then someone writes to me and says: ‘I saw something on your blog and I went and tried it – your memories are with me.’ People are taking time to do the things I suggest: that’s pretty huge, and that’s what keeps me blogging. There’s no higher compliment than that for me as a blogger.”

Just another day in the life of a fabulously cosmopolitan, unabashedly Midwestern, enthusiastically hyperlocal Blogger We Love.

Check back next week to read Tasha’s Top Tips for Bloggers!

P. S. Local bloggers, don’t forget to register your blog here. It’s quick, simple, and will help drive traffic to your blog.

P.P. S.: If you’d like to be featured in our ‘Bloggers We Love’ series (or you’d like to nominate your favorite local blogger(s) for inclusion), we’d love to hear from you! Simply send an email to esther@outside.in

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