A year ago, I said that Year Eight would have to be a big year for the future of Da Blog, and to some degree that happened. It certainly wasn’t the wasted year the previous year was; I wrote a lot more of what might be called “classic” posts, for lack of a better term, and got set up for the future when I moved to LA to be with my Dad.
But despite that, and much to my own surprise, this is only the 94th post since my last blog-day post, meaning in terms of number of posts, Year Eight on Da Blog was about on par with Year Seven. This despite ditching the Studio Show Scorecard posts and writing a bunch of posts about the future of television and video in general. Part of that has to do with the continued atrophying of webcomics posts (which I think I’m just about ready to abandon entirely, though I should have a review up by the end of the week), part of it has to do with me falling way behind on ratings for much of the year and only putting up a few weekly ratings posts in October and November. There also were long stretches without any posts for parts of the year.
Overall, however, I think this year was a lot bigger in terms of quality of content than last year. More of my posts this year made important points about television and the Internet, including the Nexus of Television and Sports in Transition series; the lack of webcomic and ratings posts meant there were fewer posts that were purely ephemeral, and more posts that had more thought put into it. It was a big year for net neutrality and cord-cutting, and while I can’t say I did a lot of reporting on it per se, I certainly think I introduced a new perspective on it, or at least would have if I had any audience whatsoever outside the Flex Schedule Watch posts. I had very few posts in 2014 that didn’t have something to do with TV in some way, and even fewer that didn’t have something to do with sports or TV. I may also be emphasizing Twitter more as a place to put interesting things, even if only for my own reference.
Next year may or may not see an increase in posting frequency. Right now I’m working on a book about the sports TV wars (a book I always thought should exist but never trusted myself to be the one to write it), partly an expansion of the Nexus of Television and Sports in Transition series, that could take up a lot of my time in the first four months or so of the new year. The hope is that this will provide a solid financial foundation and finally attract more people to the stuff I spew out here; even if that’s a pie-in-the-sky dream, at least it’d serve as an expansion of my #brand. I may try to get a lot of that written this coming week when I head back to Seattle for Christmas (as it turns out, I’m not writing this post from there because I’m not flying there until Christmas Eve and not coming back until New Year’s Eve); circumstances beyond our control have made the past few months less productive than I would have liked and put us in an apartment with no real escape from Dad’s cat, whose every lick and scratch is more than enough distraction for me. Dad and I have also talked about potentially trying to get stuff published in other venues, so look for that as well. What I do post here will probably be more of the same as in 2014: trying to convince people that broadcast television does have a role, however circumscribed, in the video landscape of the future if it’s willing to embrace it and doesn’t sacrifice itself at the altar of retransmission consent revenue, coupled with as much coverage of sports ratings as my sources will allow (to which I may be adding a new one to the list).
I may have said that Year Eight would be a big year for the future of Da Blog, but Year Nine looks to be the real deal. There are concrete plans in place, and this looks to be the year that sets the tone for the rest of Da Blog if not the rest of my life.
Sounds good man. From a fellow Angeleno.