A memorial service for Noel Sheppard, our Associate Editor, most popular and prolific blogger who passed away on March 28 after an unexpected illness, took place in California at 2 PM PDT (5 p.m. EDT) on Friday, April 25. During this hour, NewsBusters observed an “Hour of Silence” in his honor with no new posts on the site.

Below are tweets from opinion leaders mourning Noel’s loss, links to earlier items we’ve posted honoring Noel’s work, as well as the text of the eulogy, from MRC President Brent Bozell, which was read at the service.

The old saying that only the good die young is certainly apt to describe the passing of my dear friend and colleague Noel Sheppard at the age of 53.

I’ve known Noel since early 2005 when my brother Greg and I saw him contributing freelance pieces to the American Thinker. At the time, blogging was still relatively new and the political and media establishments (of both left and right) were still very wary about the idea that people without formal academic training could write about politics. As it turned out, the rest of America strongly disagreed.

By now you might have heard I was diagnosed with cancer a few days ago.

Our dear friends at Twitchy, my buddy Andrew Klavan, and the Daily Caller’s Betsy Rothstein have the blow-by-blow of my first trip to the hospital, my eventual admittance, and the astonishing number of prayers that have come in for me from around the country and the world. To say the attention was unimaginable is an understatement of epic proportions.

So let me just begin with: THANK YOU!

Updated below | In a bizarre tweet, John Schwartz, a national reporter for the New York Times decided to attack NewsBusters associate editor Noel Sheppard for celebrating his son’s upcoming wedding.

After Sheppard had noted how he was going to be “crying more than bride’s father...but for different reasons,” an apparently bitter Schwartz shot back with an insult: “Because you’ve been renting him out to workhouses all these years and you’re sorry to be losing the income?”

On Sunday, NewsBusters broke the story about NBC's Bob Costas blaming guns for the previous day's murder-suicide by an NFL football player.

During a Grapevine segment involving the incident on Fox News's Special Report Monday, host Bret Baier quoted NewsBusters' associate editor Noel Sheppard (video follows with transcript):