Wednesday, November 28, 2007

going private?

Dear Readers,

After some careful thought and reexamination of old posts, I think it may be wise to take this blog to the invite-only relm. Not because I crave exclusivity, but because I fear that some of my recent posts might be misconstrued as favoring one party or candidate or elected official over another. What I am intenting is to point out stories in the news where I think the reporter failed to provide additional context that I feel is necessary to understand what is going on.

That is, my goal is more news analysis and media critique than bashing a politican. What bugs me is not when politicians say dumb or misleading things, but when the reporters covering the story fail to call the politican on said things. Of course, I get more upset when I see such errors on topics where my personal opinion differ from the speaker, but that is mainly due to the fact that I am more sensitive to such arguments.

At any rate, I wanted to survey you, the reader, to see what you think of the prospect of going private. The upside would be a more frank writing style, the downside would be a narrower audience and by request that you not disseminate things that I write.

If you strongly believe this blog should remain public (and my hope is to make this private era a brief one), you must counter that with the prospect that my posts will not discuss the burning issues of the day in nearly the same fashion.

Please vote in the comments. If we decide to go private, I will have a separate open thread for people who would like to be invited.

6 comments:

Andrew said...

I support the move to private. I like the candid and frank writing. And I totally understand your concerns with the budding career.

On the downside, however, that would deprive many neophyte bloggers from access to some good political blogging...

But on the whole, count me as a vote for being private. Just so long as I'm allowed access.

Jennifer Killpack-Knutsen said...

I'm of a mixed opinion on what you have to do -- both have their pluses and minuses. Sorry I'm of no help.

But please include me in your invitation if you decide to go private :)

Thanks!

Ms. Alberts said...

Hi Dave! I'll read either way- I guess the question is, how many readers do you have? Will you exclude a lot of people? (Note my confidence that I won't be excluded.) :) Congrats on the clerkship!
Jaime

Clint Gardner said...

It is a tough call. If you have a built-in private audience you would be fine to have a private audience. I would caution you, however, that anything published is never truly private. I work from the perspective that whatever I put out there on the web is going to come back to haunt me.

Jeremy said...

Theorris is right.

I'd request that if you do go private that I be put on the list of your readers. I don't comment here much but I read nearly everything you write. You have a great blog!

Misty Fowler said...

Have you considered doing both? I really liked it before you had to watch what you said (consider this my formal request to be one of your valued private readers!), but I'm sure that some of what you have to say would be acceptable to say in public. I believe that WordPress allows you this option, and they also say they can import your previous posts and the comments. As soon as I finish the design of mine, I'm going to import the posts, and if all goes well, switch to WordPress.