If this keeps up they're going to be rethinking that five grand a pop...

You know you’re in the summer doldrums when O’C is earning his $5m for articles on what you hope the next topic is going to be. I, for one, simply can’t stand the excitement. I do like seeing the Rippin’ symbol all enlarged like that, though. Reminds me of John Cleese not being a Mason.

I am in the final throes of next year’s plans for the ingestion of news by the Sailors. I will obviously not suggest that people not read the Times as a matter of course, but I will no longer (futilely) require it, or at least (futilely) strongly recommend it. That’s a mug’s game. While I don’t feel in any way differently than I have in the past about the McLuhanesque connection of medium and message—I strongly believe that how stuff gets into our brains affects the stuff itself actually in our brains—I have seen too much data indicating that, well, high school students simply aren’t reading the newspaper, nor are most of them going to read the newspaper. On the other hand, an online expectation is reasonable. My biggest issue has always been the loss of serendipity when one no longer browses the physical paper, but there is certainly other serendipity out there, and let’s face it, what we really need is the core of the current events cannon, not the flakes around the edge.

So I am at the last steps of figuring the plan. I have the Feed pretty much the way I like it, having removed everything but what I think a debater ought to at least glimpse at. This is a combination of articles about rights and identity politics, philosophy, constitutional law and subjects that are perennial in LD resolutions. When the topics are live, I will add germane articles directly concerned with them (both LD and PF). What remains is a final determination of what to do with general news, which I have so far kept to a minimum. Is it enough to suggest that people simply read Today’s Paper at the Times site? Or should I add that material to the Feed? Or create another feed entirely? In aid of keeping both the Feed and my life manageable, I’m tending to the first option. But, as I say, the next week or two I’ll be studying this in depth.

Oh, yeah. One more thing. I am doing this via the Mid-Hudson League site and not my own. I see this as being more than just for Sailors, although they will be the ones I expect to use it unfailingly. So, when I get run over by a bus (the one driven by RJT in a fit of road rage as she heads down to the Meadowlands to give you know who a piece of her Wisconswegian mind), others could conceivably take up the mantle in my absence. Or for that matter collaborate now. I’m nothing if not a community kind of guy.