About Bill Shein

Bill Shein is the founder and editor of The Berkshire Argus. He also serves as chairman emeritus of the global nonprofit organization Life Would Be Far, Far Better if We Never Had to Write a Damn Bio for a Website, Inc.

After relocating from Washington, D.C., to the Berkshires in 2002, Bill wrote feature stories and humor and op-ed columns for The Berkshire Eagle. His twice-weekly Eagle column, Reason Gone Mad, was a three-time winner of the National Press Club Award for Humor.

He later wrote columns and contributed long-form reporting to the weekly Berkshire Record newspaper and the digital Berkshire Edge.

In the nineteen-nineties, Bill was a columnist and early blogger for America Online at a time when A.O.L. was, for all intents and purposes, “the Internet.” And according to the Guiness Book of World Records, he is the only content creator of that era to emerge without securing untold riches, a story he plans to recount in a choose-your-own-adventure-style memoir titled, From Rags to Rags.

Prior to AOL, he was editor and publisher of Washington Wit, a biweekly humor tabloid distributed free across metropolitan D.C. While the paper was beloved by its nearly 100,000 readers, advertisers took a wait-and-see attitude that, in the end, did not align with Wit's revenue needs.

As for the details of his earlier life, they are, regrettably, protected by law—thanks to the fine people at the Federal Witness Relocation Program and the generous provisions of 18 U.S. Code § 3521.