There are about to be some changes around here. Specifically, at least in the immediate sense, in the cadence and quantity of our content. We’re going to be covering the same things, but we’re going to be putting that together differently. We hope you like it. We think you will.
The meat of the changes comes down to two shifts. The first is that we’ll be posting a lot fewer blog posts on weekends. Things we’d normally cover on Saturday and Sunday will be covered more on Friday and Monday, with a few exceptions. The second is that a lot of Stu and Joe’s content is going to be consolidated from a number of blog posts to single, daily (on weekdays, for the most part) collections of notes, more like newsletters than previews and recaps. The first editions of those notes will be coming tonight or tomorrow, with Joe covering Iowa State’s game tomorrow, the Cubs’ signing of Wade Miley, and a few other things; and Stu covering Joe Kelly’s health, Brady Tkachuk’s captaincy, this weekend’s Burnley/Senators/NASCAR/F1 action, and a few other things. There will still be standalone blog posts most every day, but there will be fewer of them, with a lot of their content stripped down and put into these weekday notes. Our most casual readers probably won’t notice much of a change. Our most ardent readers will likely be used to the new format by the middle of next week.
Why are we doing this? The simple answer is that we need to. Our previous content strategy has grown untenable. It worked great in 2020, and well at times in 2021, but it’s grown too unwieldy, and we’ve lost the plot a little bit. We’re spending too much time in a way we don’t enjoy and in a way that doesn’t generate traffic or engagement, which is counterproductive to both of our goals. We need to free up time to spend on longer-term things. (Social media, bringing back MilkTime, the models, bringing back MilkTime, user experience on our website, the merch refresh we’re hoping to use to finance bringing back MilkTime…)
We’re hoping that a benefit of this, as we said above, will be that you like the content more. We’re hoping to streamline it, cutting out things you don’t care about and giving you more things you enjoy. That said, we’d love to hear your thoughts, so please reach out and let us know over these next couple weeks how you’re liking the new approach and what you don’t enjoy/might enjoy more than what we’re giving you. You can do that in the comments, but we also always love hearing from you by email: allthingsnit@gmail.com.
It’s helpful at times to check one’s orientation, and as we take a look at The Barking Crow’s flightpath, this feels like a good time to reset ourselves on our course. The thing we’re trying to do here is to 1) do what we want to do and 2) get the market to pay us to do it. It’s what I think makes this “art” more than “entrepreneurship” (to use a very entrepreneurial definition of art). We could try to cater to the market, but if you haven’t noticed, the media market in the United States is a vast field of dung from which the nutrients have been leeched out and replaced with something radioactive. A few green sprouts are poking through, but for the most part, the market is giving us a cesspool right now. Societally, we are not incentivizing much good out of the media. We’re flocking to hatemongers and peddlers of ignorance. We’re flocking to the self-righteous and baptizing ourselves in their faith. Sometimes, it seems our sense of self-worth is so low that we need to be given someone else to loathe, to the point that we’ll pay in the thousands through ad revenue to be pointed toward that despicable foe.
This is not a market to which we want to cater. We don’t want to pour our own bile into the hate pipeline. We don’t want to be part of the grand circular pat on the back. We want to do what we want to do, to be ourselves, and to do it so well that the market has no choice but to let us grow.
Our hunch is that there’s something people like about a website that can hold, among so many other things: 1) fanatical ravings alleging Joe Kelly to be something more than human; 2) 3,000-word essays about Bruce Springsteen/Sam Ehlinger/Cajun rideshare passengers; and 3) the best College Football Playoff ranking predictor in the (sorely lacking) business. You’re here, after all, reading this.
So, our goal is to do that thing and to do it well, to make you laugh, to make you smile, to bring you into the joke and make you question at times what is joke and what is deathly serious. We want to inform you. We want to make sports discourse less dumb. We want to make you sit and think and savor life a little more. We want you, as the story says, to like the sound. Hopefully as much as we like making it.
We think the coming changes will help us do that.
Bark.
Godspeed young man