Comments on: Cheap Seats Daily: Who’s Gonna Read reachforthewall.com?

By: Will Atwood Mitchell

Will Atwood Mitchell — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:33:08 +0000

We do not moderate or remove comments because they are critical of City Paper.

At present, we only moderate comments by people who use "sock puppets", i.e. pretend to be more than one person. We also ask that commenters refrain from posting either threats or private information about other individuals. We have an automatic spam filter which is occasionally overzealous, but we work hard to keep non-spam comments from being flagged. If you know of a specific comment that you believe has been accidentally flagged or wrongly moderated, please email your concerns to wmitchell@washingtoncitypaper.com and I will investigate for you.

By: Erik Wemple

Erik Wemple — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:45:30 +0000

Couple of notes: If Dave McKenna is a graduate of the School of Wemple, then this particular school has never boasted such a fine and accomplished alumnus. We'll be sure to feature him in the next edition of our alumni magazine. As for the point behind reachforthewall, I think what's going on here is that the Post is doing a wikiexperiment. If you register on the site, you can edit the site, posting bulletins and "stories" on what your swim club is up to and so on. Here's some of the language that greets you:

GOT NEWS?
Edit section

Coaches, parents, swimmers and fans: we’re depending on you to
keep us up-to-date on all your club’s activities and meets. Have
something you want to add?

My sense of the thinking at the Post is that, hey, here's a fanatical group of people out there---why not see if they'll do some UGC for us?

How they monetize it, well, that, as always, is the killer question.

Final point, and that relates to WCP: Thanks so much for reading carefully enough to notice that we publish stuff on the Web and then back that stale content into the paper.

By: mtpleasant

mtpleasant — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:05:25 +0000

At least they're trying something different, as opposed to certain other publications and their seldomly updated blogs (not counting today) that they then simply repurpose for the hard copy, giving readers the stalest content around. Maybe if you actually clicked on the site instead of lazily bashing it without doing any actual research (you've learned from the School of Wemple, I see), you'd see that they're courting the vast suburban swimming audience. I'm serious: go to any community pool in the suburbs on a Saturday for a meet. About 75 percent of the parents there have a Post in their hands, and 100 percent of them would love to see their kids' results someplace, which is part of what the site is seemingly trying to do. (side note: anyone else notice that the comments here are now seemingly being moderated, with all anti-CP comments never seeing the light of day?)