A brief history on Vapor Reporter

This all started with a number of phone conversations between Morandir and his good friend SnowDragon back in 2011. Show didn’t even have a name at that point. It was a case where they jokingly said to each other people learn more from listening to them talk vape for an hour than they could by searching the forums out for a week. They recorded 3 episodes (which Mor still has on his computer and might one day post up), but they had no real place to host it. They let a few of their Skype buddies listen to it and they enjoyed it, but it never found a home. SnowDragon opened up his shop (Area 51 vapors) and didn’t have the time to record anymore. Fast forward to 2012. Morandir met Willard Roads through a vaping forum he was admin’ing at the time. They got to talking more and more off forum, and found out Will played a big part in the .com bubble of the early and mid 90’s. Willard wanted to create a website and podcast that focused instead on reviewing, on helping new and veteran vapors. They launched Vapor Reporter first here on WordPress, and then later moved it over to it’s own site (only to have it moved backed to WP currently). They had recorded 9 shows, though only 5 ever made it on-line, and despite them not being on iTunes or having a RSS feed they were getting 50-200 listens an ep. Morandir went by Joe Friday back in those days because of his position working with a vaping company, he didn’t want anything to come off as biased (side note Will was not Will’s real name either). It didn’t last long though. Around October of that year they had started having some problems with the direction of the site. Will wasn’t updating it enough to Mor’s tastes, and when he did post an article it was edited to a point where it was no longer recognizable. It took 3 hours to record each show, then Will would whittle it down to an hour and add all his post production which would take anywhere between 2-3 weeks. They had a couple of heart to hearts, a very long talk on their way home from VaperCon, but still nothing was moving forward. It all came to a head before the end of the year where personal issues made Will leave the project. He turned the site over to Mor, and well… He only had basic experience in html, no idea how to tackle the coding used on the site, and anytime he adjusted anything it would crash. On top of all that by then through his admin work on the forums and all the feelings from the whole experience, Mor was burnt out from doing a vaping show. Mind of Morandir was born, and while he still discussed vaping (especially the early episodes of MoM), it was really for whatever was on his mind at the time. Whether that was news, politics, personal experience, etc. So it was Vapor Reporter was put to bed.

In February of 2014 Mor reconnected with Patrick Duffy. They had met him while touring some of the Baltimore area vape shops the year before hand. Duff was a big fan of VR, and was wondering what had happened with it. Mor explained to him the story, turns out he has a background in web design and podcasting, so together they started up the Rogue Intel network. MoM came over, as did all the old VR eps, and they tried doing a show called “Duff and Mor”. Both knew Patrick wasn’t the co-host for VR, and at that point Mor still didn’t want to do it. Duff and Mor failed, they had different views on what they wanted from the show, and it lead to Morandir taking a break from the internet almost entirely for a few months. During that time he stepped down from his “management” position at RI, and seriously debated selling all his podcasting equipment and just being done with it. After a lot of soul searching he decided to get back into it. In September he returned to doing MoM and Patrick was to do his own show “Rogue Intel Prime” (which he ended up being on far more than he ever should have been). VR stayed retired, that was until we approached December. For his 4th vaping anniversary decided to do a very vapecentric podcast. Asked his good buddy Rocco if he would join him on it, to which he said yes, so when Mor went to visit him for his birthday they sat down and recorded two hours of them just talking about their vaping journeys and what’s going on in the vaping world. They had a blast doing it, and from there was born the current incarnation of Vapor Reporter. Instead of it being an NPR type show that Mor didn’t enjoy listening to, they made it a much more laid back atmosphere. Our tagline says it all “I just don’t want to smoke”. It’s a show not just covering the news in the vaping world, or giving tips to vapers, but a place for people to discuss their vaping journey. We’ve had people like SnowDragon, Ms. Stephanie (who has now become the permanent co-host), and our buddy Travis on. We still cover the what’s going on in the vaping world, and do a few reviews here and there, but our goal is to share fellow vapers stories.

Recently we left RI network all together. Patrick and all of us here at VR had very different views on what direction to go, and for the best of all parties involved determined it was good for us to part ways. He is now free to make RIP into whatever he wants to, and we’re able to keep VR what we’ve always envisioned. Our hope was we could eventually get access to the WordPress site for Vapor Reporter, which as of today we have. That way we could all write up any reviews or articles we felt needed on top of the weekly show. When we do any review, it’s always very technical. Something you can’t really convey via video as well as you can in written word and with graphs (though we still might do little product view videos just showing you the dimensions and such on YouTube).

So there’s our story. Anyone who wants to join an episode please let us know, we’ll work around your schedule.