Best of the Blogs At A Crossroad: We Need Your Feedback
It is hard to believe, but we are a month short of 6 years of blogging at this site. That’s an eon in blogging history, and thanks to all of you, we have been able to sustain interest that long! We appreciate your support and participation over the years. Now we feel that we need to make some changes, so we need your feedback on what we are doing right, where we are off track, and how we can get better.
As we all know, time flies when you blog. So here we are now, covering our second national election having called many things right the first time around. Some of us were right about the good Doctor Dean early on, and while we rooted for our wind-surfing Lieutenant Kerry, we called most of his blunders as they happened. We did a media photo analysis of the more favorable New York Times political coverage of Bush over Kerry that got some attention, and one of us was part of the voters who put Dr. Dean in charge of the DNC. We were the first to give an award to Dana Priest of the Washington Post for her breakthrough story on rendition, long before the story won a Pulitzer Prize and folks were thinking of making a movie about it with Meryl Streep and Jack Gyllenhaal. While we got that one right, I dumped on Al Gore’s documentary and took a lot of heat from you all while he went on to win an Academy Award and the Nobel Prize.
Among a whole bunch of original stories and some me-too posts, we were on top of immigration agitation before it became a hot tamale, called for the buffalo to replace the jackass as the symbol of the Democratic Party, rooted for Richard Clarke and trashed George Tenet before and after he got his tarnished Medal of (Kiss-Ass) Freedom from the Decider. Rove and Rice got cooked regularly on these pages, and Groom regularly reminded us to “follow the money” when we came to some dead-ends. God and religion got some coverage, but the devil was in the details. We regularly expressed our collective feeling that the life of one American soldier was not worth the war in Iraq, and we angrily marveled at a system that keeps blood off of Bush’s hands. Poetry sometimes gave us pause. And, through it all, many of you regularly added your analysis and insights, enriching the postings, and we are all the richer for that kind of participation.
Now we are at a crossroads and we want to make some changes and additions on what we cover and how cover it. We sense it is time for change and renewal. So we need your feedback. You can make them anonymously here to protest your regular standing as commentators…or lay it all out in the open. (Or you can send your comments privately to me at joshhammond@comcast.net.)
We want to know 1) what is working for you; 2) what is not working for you; and 3) what, if any, improvements we should think of making.
If you want to be polite and not give us any general feedback, then specifically what do you think of the idea of having more bloggers cover more topics with multiple daily postings as the goal? Would that appeal to you? Do you think it would attract more readers? What other topics besides politics and some cultural issues, such as religion, should we cover?
Many thanks. We look forward to your comments.
Posted: November 28th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 9
Comments
Comment from timr
Time: November 29, 2007, 10:19 am
josh, maybe you could do an open thread type of post every day so that people like me could go off topic with interesting nuggets that they find that might prove to be of general interest. Maybe something like this, which I came across while wasting time in Yellowknife waiting for the wx to clear.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071126_america_in_the_time_of_empire/
I am sure that regular posters at this blog come across items like this all the time, but hesitate to post them because others will think that they are going off topic.
Other thoughts, some posts are rather opaque, while others seem to cut off debate with the attitude that I know I am right and all of you are wrong, IOW, some bloggers flat refuse to acknowledge that they might be wrong about some subjects-I am not saying that any one person does this, at one time or another, everyone does.
wx is clearing, I am out of here.
Comment from Sasha
Time: November 29, 2007, 6:17 pm
I’m just a simple soul so I have simple ideas. I hate that the text area is so narrow. Ok, Digby does it too and I hate that as well but there you are.
And, in truth, if I have to choose I first go places where folks post every day. Then I visit my friends. And then I select based in some really loose way on subject matter.
What I mean by that is that I go to scotusblog if the courts are up to something or to talkleft with some kinds of legal issues, feministing and pandagon if they did yet another stupid thing to women, etc. And then I go to places that seem to have a bit more estrogen. (Yeah, I’m a bigot. Deal.) What that adds up to is that I come here much less frequently than I used to.
My point is that I don’t think it is ever a single thing. Sure took me a long time to say it, didn’t it?
Comment from Anonymous
Time: November 30, 2007, 7:35 am
I my self would like to see more Bush bashing.
Comment from Pat
Time: November 30, 2007, 8:51 am
I agree with anonymous. I lose interest quickly when the subject is about the 2008 elections. I can hear about that on CNN. What I can’t hear about on the telly is honest reporting about how the war is going, or what’s happening in Iran, or what bush and company are up to now. This is the reason I turned to blogs in the first place.
Comment from timr
Time: November 30, 2007, 11:23 am
and whats with all the Hillary bashing? Why little or nothing on the repigs
Comment from bdr
Time: November 30, 2007, 12:34 pm
Timr, what could be said of the assholery of repigs that hasn’t been said?
Hey, LOOK AT THAT! Those republicans are shit-for-breath lying bedwetters intent on an authoritarian gov’t that kicks brown people and Liberals out of the country, but not before suspending habeus corpus and torturing the fuck out of them for giggles.
Yawn.
Comment from Leftcoast
Time: November 30, 2007, 2:41 pm
I’d like to see us linked up to other blogs. Unless you have some direct contact with BOB, we’re not on the radar of the major sites like C&L, Hufffpost or others. We should be. I think that would help generate more velocity and diversity into the site.
Re: Bushco, speaking for myself, I go into periods where I want to do nothing but rant on Bushco, shine a light on the escalating atrocities being committed by the administration on the nation. But like a lot of people who have done this for a number of years, each outrage makes you somewhat numb to the previous one, which is why they’re succeeding in creating the fascist shift Naomi Wolf writes about. There is so much bullshit and smoke to work through that it’s hard to keep it up.
Comment from Genevieve McNulty
Time: November 30, 2007, 4:17 pm
I miss the pictures (being a visually-oriented person).
I liked being sucked into the story and not have to decide whether to click the link and read it.
I hate to read petty, personalized insults against the bush crew. It demeans the legitimacy of the anti-bush sentiment. It’s not like there isn’t plenty of fascist behavior going on to rant against.
I wish the site had some outlet for the frustrated (or politically numb) who want to come up with more positive, active things to do against the current regime.
Comment from timr
Time: December 1, 2007, 11:28 am
bdr, point. But still, why all the hillary bashing? Comments on ideas and record are fine, but why not keep away from the repig TP. and stay away from personal insults-not saying that you do that, but generally try not to go off on BS like… oh her laugh is so grating(tucker carlson, et al) or what is this waving her hands..chris matthews(a real clinton hater, and has a man love crush on thompson and mccain)or making fun of her name(hilla?)-now that, like calling dems democRATs by all the repigs sounds like a bunch of 3 year olds fighting over toys. Points can be made,I think better, by not getting down to the level of sites like rs, lgf, etc.(or maybe I just got somewhat spoiled by spending some time in Canada, most everyone was very polite, but can get their point across without desending to the level that the repigs do)
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