Thompson realized the value of capturing history 45 years ago as a 10-year-old schoolboy in Farmville, Virginia, when the community, caught up in a fight over integration, closed the public schools and opened an all-white private school.

Thompson wrote about his experiences and submitted his story to The Farmville Herald,the local newspaper. His essay was picked up by other newspapers around he country. He also took pictures for the paper.

When his family relocated to the Blue Ridge Mountain community of Floyd, the then 14-year-old Thompson took his photographs and stories to Pete Hallman, editor of the weekly Floyd Press. Hallman encouraged the young man to continue writing and taking photos, teaching him the ins and outs of the newspaper business.

Thompson went on to join the staff of The Roanoke Times where he covered the police beat, emerging racial turmoil in the city and tackled other tough subjects. His story about a young girl who obtained an abortion (illegal at the time) won the top feature writing award from the Virginia Press Association. Another, about street racers in the city, won another feature writing award while his coverage of the murder of a Southwest Roanoke couple and the abduction and rape of their teenaged daughters brought the top news writing award from the association

After moving on to The Telegraph in Alton, Illinois, Thompson continued to win awards for writing and photography, capturing the Illinois Associated Press Managing Editors top prizes for news, feature and column writing as well as first place awards from the Illinois Press Association.

Thompson took a sabbatical from newspapers in 1981 and moved to Washington and work on Capitol Hill, where he served as press secretary to two members of Congress, Chief of Staff to a third and then Special Assistant to the Ranking Member of the House Space, Science and Technology Committee.

The committee worked with the National Science Foundation to bring the Internet into the private sector and Thompson saw the tremendous potential of the 'Net as a communications tool. He used that foresight to start a web hosting and design company in 1994 and that same year launched Capitol Hill Blue as the web's first political news site.

Today, Doug Thompson Media encompasses the original web hosting and design company (The Buffalo Mountain Company), a photography business (Blue Ridge Photography), documentary films (Buffalo Mountain Films), a foundation (Our America) and several other companies.

In 2001, Our America launched a 10-year project to document and first decade of the new century through stories, photos and films.

Despite his success in new media, Thompson remains a newspaperman at heart and lives by the creed that it is the role of a newspaperman to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."