We’re working on some changes here and wanted to give you a heads-up on what’s coming.
Starting next week, we’re going to shift towards delivering more “long-form” feature writing combined with daily curation of all the things that we think are important for you to hear about right away. In practical terms, what that means is our team (Nancy Scola, Nick Judd and me) will be publishing feature stories roughly once every other day, while what you’ve come to know and love as “Clearing the Cache” will expand and appear on a moment-by-moment basis as very short posts linking out to relevant material.
If your main way of keeping up with techPresident is by RSS, you’ll see smaller posts more often. If you mainly consume techPres via our Daily Digest email, each day you’ll get all those short cache items, plus summaries of each new feature as it appears.
Why are we making these changes? Well, we’re in the process of a complete site redesign which is scheduled to roll out in May and these changes are part of the working plan. Our thinking is influenced by two trends that we’ve noticed in new media. First, with so much content and chatter streaming out there via multiple means, long-form reporting and analysis seems to be what actually adds value and drives conversation. And second, with so much content and chatter streaming out there, people need smart curation to manage the stream and pull out signal from all the noise.
We think we’re uniquely well-suited to tackle both of those challenges. But we could also be wrong. So our plan is to try out this new editorial rhythm, listen to your feedback, and go from there.
We’re hard at work on other changes as well, including a better commenting system, topics pages to highlight our past coverage of important issues now in the news and also surface more of the good stuff that’s buried deep in our seven years of archives, a new way to pull in commentary from outside observers and inside players, and a sprightly new design. We realize that rolling out a new editorial pattern without all those other changes may be risky. Frankly, though, we also think that content is king. If we keep working hard at serving you by covering the intersecting worlds of politics and technology, we’re headed in the right direction.
Are we on track or sliding off the rails? Let us know via Twitter @techpresident, or by email to pdf-at-personaldemocracy-dot-com.
Micah Sifry
March 11, 2011