Sunday, January 02, 2011

A note to our readers

Hey --

We would have liked to have been done sooner. We're still done sooner than we have been in months, so that's something at least. We started much later than normal due to end-of-the-year pieces, end of the year and the Iraq post Saturday at The Common Ills.

We thank everyone who helped with this edition. The credits for it are Dallas and the following:


The Third Estate Sunday Review's Ava,
Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude,
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man,
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review,
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills),
Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix,
Mike of Mikey Likes It!,
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz),
Ruth of Ruth's Report,
Wally of The Daily Jot,
Trina of Trina's Kitchen,
Marcia of SICKOFITRDLZ,
Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends,
Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts,
and Ann of Ann's Mega Dub.

Some of the above helped out on everything. If we miss credit in the following, it's due to being tired only. (And we'll happily correct it in next week's note.)
This was an obvious one. We tried to bring as much attention to this one community wide as we could. If you're wondering why, you must not have read it. (And going to the Law and Disorder Radio website will allow you to stream it.)


As Ava notes in our roundtable, we had no planned Iraq feature for this week. We assumed we'd have it for the editorial but had no planned topic and, honestly, started our rough draft without a topic. It was piecemeal but once we hit on the topic, we wrote an opening and think it works. Who worked on this: Mike, Betty, Kat, Elaine, Stan, Ann, Ruth and us (Ava and C.I.).
We (Ava and C.I. -- it's very confusing when we're doing the note to the readers instead of Jim) wrote this. We had no idea what we were covering but Ty had printed up some e-mails and this was also suggested to us by Stan. He actually brought the NPR segment in as a group idea and we were all for it but time ran out. When we were searching for a TV topic, we were going through Ty's e-mails (he'd told us he printed some up that were on TV) and saw this. Stan insisted we take it (we'd encouraged him to take the topic back to his site when there was no time to work on it as a group) and we thank him for it. Is it worth reading? What we (Ava and C.I.) write is never worth reading and we're honestly surprised anyone bothers.

This is worth reading but here you have Ann added to the mix. We offered a fourth byline to Dallas. He went through checking our links. Look at all those links. And grasp that the ones for shows broadcast in January, February, March, May and December all had to be individually checked. He did that for us and we thank him tremendously. (He turned down a co-writing credit but we will at least thank him here.) So, if you've read the article, you know that 18% is the number of female guests on Terry's show in 2010. Terry Gross is a woman. Sometimes our biggest sexist pigs are women. Terry needs to be called out. While we know this article will be passed around, we also know that various outlets which could echo the findings will stay silent out of fear that NPR won't book them. And that's why the feminist movement needs a lot of new life in it. Isaiah did the illustration for this and we need to go in and note that somewhere. But we've been up all night and that will have to wait.

Our Iraq roundtable. We hadn't planned that as such. Ruth and Mike turned it into that with their initial responses (and we're glad they did). Participants are listed except Dallas who hunted down all links (and we thank him).

We covered Pat Benatar's book and Belinda Carlisle's book in 2010. They are rockers. We did not cover Roseanne Cash, Natalie Cole and Dionne Warwick's books. We got e-mails about that. So we wrote this piece to make up for oversight. This was written by: Betty, Stan, Ann, Ruth, Marcia, Rebecca, Mike and us.
We try to do magazine surveys once a month. We don't always make that. One of our readers, longterm readers, is serving in Iraq and asked us to regularly provide a look at the magazines which is why we expanded it from just political magazines to music ones. The message from this piece is that there's nothing new in music in the eyes of those putting out music magazines. This was written by: Kat, Elaine, Wally, Betty, Mike, Ann, Stan and us.
Our big concern was what could we do different on this umpteenth time tackling the political magazines? We decided to emphasize the visuals. Probably had Dona in mind when that thought came to us. (Dona is the one who always pushes for visuals here.) This piece was written by: Kat, Trina, Betty, Mike, Elaine, Stan, Rebecca, Ruth and us.
Mike, Elaine, Cedric, Ann, Kat, Betty, Rebecca, Ruth, Marcia, Stan and Wally wrote this and we thank them for it.

And that's what we came up with. We tried to provide a variety of topics. We probably didn't. We did cover the Iraq War in two pieces, so that's great. We had a book feature and readers are always asking for more of those. So we think it was a good mix. While working on this note, we remembered something we forgot.

The archives.

When Dona, Jim and Ty flipped the template years ago, we lost our weekly archive. At that point, we started doing them as entries and putting them on the permalinks. Today, after the year is up, they show, for example "2009" under "Blog Archive" (as opposed to what we put in the links). If you have DSL, you can click on those years listed under "Blog Archive" and it shows week by week. If you have dial-up, it doesn't. So for that reason, next week we'll publish a "2010" to go with:

We've already copied and pasted it in but it was too late for us to add here so it'll go up next week.

If that made no sense, don't worry, it just means it didn't apply to you.

We'll see you next week and Dona, Ty, Jess and Jim will be back with us then.



Peace.

-- Ava and C.I.