Jim (Con't): Why face to face? Because the edition fell apart. Dona was sick, Ava and C.I. were tired -- they'd already written their TV feature and, when they rejoined us, they found Dona sick and a lack of focus. They suggested we all go to sleep -- which we did -- and regroup later. What we've done, to try to turn out an edition, is a lot of farming out. And we're doing a round table. First up, in reply to last week's "Roundtable," Carl e-mailed. Ty?
Ty: Carl insists that the number of seats Dem lost was 36 "not 9 as C.I. insisted last week. I found that to be very surprising. And I expect a correction."
C.I.: First off, I believe I said -- I know I said -- that I wasn't following this and it was an approximate. Also true is that the numbers being cited by Carl were not the numbers from last week. I said 9 and that was net loss for Democrats. Since that time, the net loss has dropped to seven because other results have come in. I stated I was tired, I was asked for a number and gave one. The net loss -- last Sunday -- stood at nine. What Carl's doing is adding in the Republican wins and I don't know what else. But currently the net loss is 7. The Republicans picked up seven more seats -- governors seats -- than did the Democrats.
Jess: I'm looking at the link -- and Carl, I'm the one who provided a link last week and stated -- with no qualifiers -- that it was 9, that wasn't C.I., that was me. Check the transcript. Dems got 19 seats in the mid-terms and Republicans got 29 for a total Republican gain of 7 and a Democrat loss of 7. That's according to the New York Times which notes one race went to an independent and one race is still undecided. So, Carl, don't e-mail next week, after that one race is decided, telling us that our numbers are one off. We're not predicting the future, we're talking about where things stand on the day this is published.
Ty: Jim, how do we determine each week that Ava and C.I.'s articles are the most popular? That question came from Denise in Key West.
Jim: We determine that by the fact that they result in the most e-mail. We've always determined it that way. Equally true is that web searches turn their pieces up at higher volume than anything else. For the last two months, we've had a new tool. At some point Blogger/Blogspot added "Stats" feature -- or we finally noticed it. It tracks page views and views for single articles. We can, for example, see the ten most viewed articles here and, no surprise, they're all Ava and C.I. pieces. That's not a surprise to us, it doesn't upset us. We're glad to have them. Just to recap for anyone new to this site, in 2005, we started it. You know what, I'm going to kick this over to Jess who doesn't speak a great deal during these roundtables. Jess, tell us the story.
Jess: Okay, well the site started in January 2005. We had wanted to start it, C.I. was speaking at our campus, Jim drug C.I. back and she worked on the first edition with us. She did a few others as she said she would and then it became every edition. We did group writing -- meaning we all worked on the articles together. Ava and C.I. did not want to do a TV piece that first week. They were very against it. Jim said we had to have TV as a beat. We were gearing up to be a site for college students -- because that's what we were then. And Jim pointed out that a lot of college students watch some form of TV. So, over their objections, we did TV as a beat. And the first two or three weeks, it was a group piece. And the e-mails came in and people loved this sentence or that paragraph or . . . And it was always what Ava and C.I. had done. In fact, let me toss to Ava.
Ava: I was Dona's roommate back then. Jim, Jess and Ty were roommates. Jim obviously had a crush on Dona. I always felt that I was only invited to get Dona to come. In all of the talks about doing a site that really took hold in the fall of 2004, I was not included. I'd hear about them, but I wasn't included. C.I. actually already knew my family and we knew of each other. So there was that in the first writing edition. Also true, Jim and Dona were fawning over one another's ideas during that writing edition so that went in. Ty and Jess were more focused on what they thought worked. And everything I was suggesting -- for a topic or as part of an article -- was being shot down. C.I.'s the one who said, "Hold on a minute is anyone listening to these suggestions?" And the way it developed in those first weeks is that C.I. and I -- especially on the TV piece -- would be off to the side lobbying our spit wads from a distance. Some of it would get included, some of it wouldn't. But we teamed up for a number of reasons including the fact that we had and have shared ideas and beliefs on many issues.
Jess: And those "spitballs" were always the heart of the TV piece, what people responded too. And that includes our own families. But we turned it over to Ava and C.I. because they clearly knew what they were doing and how to reach readers. They didn't want to receive credit because we were doing group writing and they didn't want to be the ones who ended that. So for about a month or so we didn't announce that they were writing on their own. But then Jim just got sick of hearing from his family how great the piece 'we' wrote was. And if we hadn't disclosed on the writing, we probably would have built up resentments which would have led to this site closing down long ago. But as Jim has noted many times, he's proud to say, "Yeah, that was great, wasn't it? Ava and C.I. can really touch a nerve and reach a reader."
Dona: Jess, one more thing. Talk about the visual.
Jess: We didn't have visuals when we started. We didn't do that. We'd never thought about or anything. Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts became the community cartoonist in early 2005. He did that to give The Common Ills a visual look. We would include his cartoons here for articles. And Dona was always pushing for visuals. But I date Ava, we live together now, and I really wanted the weekly feature she and C.I. do to have an illustration so that, just by looking, you knew it was them. And I worked on a few by myself -- most were awful, some of which were used -- and then Rebecca and I worked on one together and, for about a year, that was the illustration. It was later replaced with people in front of a TV screen -- Condi Rice, Donald Rumfseld and I forget who the third was -- and now they use Barack and a TV screen. After we started using my bad visuals for Ava and C.I., we started using visuals for other pieces and today we try to have visuals for most of our pieces.
Ty: Loraine e-mailed wondering if we were going to cover the issues over The Morning Show?
Kat: I'll grab that one. Actually, we'd planned to and Isaiah even did an illustration to go with that article. But the whole edition just lost its focus when Dona got sick. Ava and C.I. returned -- from writing their TV piece -- to find the whole edition in shambles and they were tired and others were tired and no one wanted to grab the leadership reigns -- those are usually held by Jim and Dona. The two of them will squabble and square off and it's not something the rest of us look forward to or desire. I doubt we're doing a KPFA piece since we're doing a roundtable.
Jim: We might do one next week. When we regrouped, Ava and C.I. were mainly looking at past ideas that hadn't been worked on before. This is an odds and ends issue. For example, Jess went on a candy run early Sunday morning. He came back with a story about a guy who made a comment about New England -- we're in the Bay Area. Ava and C.I. pointed out that Betty had an idea for a short story a few weeks back about Bay Area mornings. So Betty, Wally, Jess and Ty worked on the piece that became a verse piece. And we've got an illustration of Fisherman's Wharf -- here in the Bay Area -- for that piece.
Dona: And I need to speak on the KPFA issue because we're getting a lot of e-mail on that and some indy sites have posted links or quotes from articles we've written here -- sometimes the full article -- because we've been covering KPFA for some time. If you're writing about that and want to include us, please do. We're not offended. If you want to repost an article in full, please do and please include a link to our original piece. I'm not interested in being quoted -- I did speak to two reporters on background for pieces last week, one knows C.I. and played the friend card, the other wrote a very convincing e-mail -- I don't know that anyone is -- quoted in terms of being interviewed for an article. Wally, Kat, Ava and C.I. are on the road Monday through Friday, so they're not doing interviews. But anyone's welcome to use the pieces. A link's great but if you're trying to figure out how to credit you can say "Third Estate Sunday Review" or "Third Estate." Or "The Third Estate Sunday Review." Ava and C.I. wrote a lot of those articles themselves. We've long noted in Jim's note when that happens but on more recent stuff we tend to add "(Ava and C.I.)" to the title of the piece so people will know right away. I'm sorry that we don't have a KPFA speech but everyone's tired, C.I. still hasn't had time to work on The Common Ills. We've got to do an editorial still and we're hoping to do one more piece. We may not have time.
Ty: Wally, Carrie e-mailed wondering why, at your own site, you rarely note Iraq but here you are always bringing it up?
Wally: At my site, Cedric and I do joint-posts and have for some time. Our focus has always been the White House. That was true when Bush was occupying it, it's been true since Barack was elected. We're doing a humor site. It can be difficult to find humor in Iraq. If we're able to, we do an Iraq piece -- though, regardless, we always include C.I.'s "Iraq snapshots" each day. In a roundtable, I tend to bring it up because it's an issue that matters.
Jim: Betty's been working with us on each edition since March of 2005. That's in reply to Renee's e-mail and Renee wondered if Betty noticed any big changes during that time?
Betty: This roundtable's going very briskly and the reason for that is it is a smaller number of people. When everyone's participating it goes much slower. In part because some participate by phone so after someone speaks, there's usually a pause as everyone's polite waiting to see who's going to jump in. In fact when you read -- in these pieces -- someone saying "I'll grab that," it usually follows a lenghty silence. In addition, it's more difficult when there are more people. You have to listen more closely than you do otherwise. If Kat or I'm popping off being funny and we're all facing each other, that's obvious by our body language and faces. But if it's happening while people are participating by phone, it requires more consideration or more processing. I don't know if that's clear. On articles that get written -- as opposed to transcript pieces -- they tend to be stronger because someone will point out, "That's not quite right" or "That's a weak spot" and we'll spend forever trying to strengthen or fix a section. So what goes up here these days is probably a lot stronger than it was in 2005 or 2006. The writing process can be a lot longer.
Jim: Jude e-mailed to say, "I love Ava and C.I.'s writing and I know they have to grab current events as well but the fall season is going on and I'm really hoping they'll weigh in on an entertainment show this week. I'm thrilled with the last four articles taking on the news and more. But I'm really hoping we can have at least one week where the focus is on entertainment." Ava or C.I.?
Ava: Well this week we are doing entertainment. If it's any consolation to Jude, he's waited patiently and so have friends with new shows. As Jude realized, we have to grab somethings. For example, we did the way Big Media covered WikiLeaks and then we had to do a piece on how Beggar Media covered it. I do understand Jude's frustration and when Jim was trying to pitch a current events angle to us, we both rejected it, C.I. and I, saying we'd gone too long without reviewing a TV show.
C.I.: Ava's explained it very well. I'll just add that I'm sure Jude has a favorite or two and some shows he dislikes. And the favorites need support and 'buzz' and we do understand that, Ava and I, and we honestly feel badly that we've not been able to cover more TV entertainment shows this year. I would ask Jude to please e-mail whenever he feels we've gone too long on that because we do need the reminder. I'm guessing Jude sat on his complaint for a week or two before e-mailing. And we have done a string of non-entertainment TV pieces. That's why Ava and I were adament to Jim that we would be covering a sitcom this week. But what was noticeable to us was probably noticeable to Jude long before. So my apologies on that.
Jim: Okay and Dona noted this would be a mini-roundtable with a strict time limit which we have now met. So this is a rush transcript, errors and all.
