Archive for December 5, 2011
Whatever Happened To New Mexico Central?
by John Weckerle
Well, we’re not sure.
It’s been well over a month since our last article, during which we’ve encountered some life changes that should prove to be both significant and positive – but which have taken away from the time we’ve had to put into New Mexico Central. During this hiatus, we’ve been reflecting on the original purpose of the site and how it’s evolved. The original intent was to provide a centralized venue in which local folks without access to web authoring capabilities could provide news and express reasonably-supported commentary on Estancia Valley and East Mountain issues. People seemed very enthusiastic about the concept initially, but except for a very small number of notable exceptions, that enthusiasm did not extend to actually providing articles – especially after we decided that we were not interested in having NM-Central.com become a soapbox for neoconservative politics. As venues such as Facebook surged, and blog hosting became readily available, the likelihood of receiving contributions appeared to diminish, and for some time now we have relied heavily on a) press releases, b) original articles written primarily by one person, and c) taking the local Tea Party chapters to task for consistently publishing false information and a certain tendency toward intolerance.
Let’s take a look at some of this. From a purely selfish standpoint, cutting and pasting press releases gets tedious – and since we don’t have time to post every single day and the releases tend to come out a relatively short time before the events in question, they’re often out of date by the time we get to them. Writing original articles can be fun for us and informative for the reader, but doing it right and properly researching the topics in question represents a time-consuming effort that is difficult to perform frequently when one is employed full-time. When the person doing the writing also spends a lot of time researching and writing at work, it’s that much tougher to crank the articles out on a regular basis. Perhaps most importantly, the original concept was not for one person to put out articles for others to read, and even the comments have been fewer than we expected.
Rapping the Tea Party’s knuckles (and those of their sources) occasionally has probably been worth doing and, at least to some, worth reading. However, we have to think that it’s getting tedious to read because it’s getting tedious to write. There is a limit to the number of times one needs to point out that this blog or that blithely publishes false or misleading information, or that it makes what appear to be prejudiced statements, before readers have enough information to come to their own conclusions on whether the progenitors of said content retain any credibility, moral standing or, for that matter, sanity. We’re not saying that we’re going to leave them alone forever – these are, after all, our most commented-on articles – but to be blunt what we see when we check in on their web sites is essentially “more of the same” and there seems limited value in continuing to comment, frequently, on the same thing over and over. It’s been well over a month since our last Tea Party article, and even though our reaction to the content on their sites is the same, we find ourselves disinclined to start tapping the keys just yet.
We’re going to continue the reflection, and with that in mind, we could use a little input from our readers. What, in the past, have you most enjoyed? On what types of topics would you be most inclined to comment? Is there something you’d like to see more of, or something new you’d like to see added? Let us know, and we’ll keep your thoughts in mind as we decide what path to take.