OK guys, WordPress has moved all our content over here to the new place. The process has resulted in a few down periods but I think the worst of the interruptions are over. The site redirect from the old site is now on for good. I am in the process of enabling comments on our post archives and rebuilding the sidebars, footer areas etc. Because of time constraints the process could last into next week so please bear with me. The new Slabbed will have a cleaner look and feel. My goal is through time is to visually morph Slabbed into the small media business Slabbed New Media has become. I never was an anonymous blogger folks so I figure this is a natural progression of things.
I am playing around with the bbPress forums so that is still a work in process. I put the open thread back up while I learn the ropes.
On a tangentially related note, while redoing the contact page I noticed several reader comments dating back to September of last year that ended up in our spam que including some very good ones from regular Slabbed commenters (you guys know who you are) plus a few others from unhappy readers over things like certain addresses showing in the Louisiana Secretary of State database connected to certain business highlighted on Slabbed are evidently residential addresses. I value reader feedback but I must say the best way to keep your address off Slabbed is to not let it be used on Secretary of State filings, which are public records.
Finally yesterday I chatted briefly with one of my best sources, the person that inspired “The Wino”, a composite character that is an amalgamation of my best sources of information on the Jefferson Parish Scandal. The topic was the now retracted Times Picayune reporting on the Goat Herders. What the person told me reminded me of what I consider one of the top 5 most insightful comments left on Slabbed.
To understand why it made my top 5 list one must first understand what got me to this point on Slabbed is the culmination of 13 years of so of insatiable curiosity about the power of the internet to influence events. Coming in as a newbie blogger moderating Slabbed, I knew jacksh!t about the media biz. I simply played to my own strengths, that insatiable curiosity being chief among them, to stumble and bumble my way here writing this post.
I say this because The Wino made it clear the reason he/she snagged my ear was precisely because of the medium being the message. Keeping in mind the sage advice of Slabbadabbadoo, I’ll paraphrase what The Wino said when reminding me of the difference between blogs like Slabbed and other types of traditional media. TeeVee is about stuffing as much eye candy as possible into a 2 minute segment. Traditional print media is about stuffing as much information as possible into 1000 words or less. Both are after content and many times the media purveyors do not care about the subject itself beyond the fact it is monetized content generated by a time-honored process. Bloggers want to get to the bottom of things or as Jason Berry once wrote here, “the search for the truth”. I guess it naturally follows the mindset in how a story is approached between the different mediums is fundamentally different. To the extent we honor diversity here on Slabbed I think we should honor those differences too.
For my part I’m grateful so many people in the print media have taken the time to give me a steer or two as I gain a comprehension and appreciation for the business side of things. I especially appreciated the fact my ability to confound some of the best of my local written word brethren on the various JP beats with my ability to ascertain information they spent weeks developing via traditional gumshoe journalism techniques is actually the best compliment I could receive. It is my hope you guys understand the search for the truth is not necessarily always a competition.
Over the next few weeks I’ll try to share a few more thoughts about where I think Slabbed fits into the local media landscape. The time for such a conversation with the Slabbed Nation is right IMHO.
sop