With the year drawing to a close, it's appropriate to look back and do a little introspection on all of this blogging stuff.

The Daily Gotham was started in April of 2005, with the intent of mirroring at a local level the functions of Daily Kos. These are, at the risk of being reductive, to provide a media platform to Progressives shut out of the lamestream media's obsession with horseraces and process gossip, and broadly to assist the Progressive movement in organizing, messaging, fundraising, and so on. It also came about, more along the way and by accident, that we promoted Progressive candidates who did not fit the media's storyline of the moment, such as Steve Harrison and Chris Owens. In that, I think we've succeeded. As things stand today, The Daily Gotham is the City's top left-leaning news blog, by any measure: traffic, Technorati rankings, Google rankings, ad revenue, you name it.

We've also been lucky enough to expand our roster of contributors, especially in the last few weeks. There is Dan Jacoby, well-known in La Movida for his activism, especially with DFNYC; and Paul, NDM's well-regarded Political Director; we're also in ongoing discussions with several more people, whom we expect to come on board in the near future. For example, I just got off the phone with Roy Moskowitz, formerly Steve Harrison's communications director, who adds inter alia the perspective of a Staten Island resident. Welcome aboard, y'all, and please know that we are thrilled to have you.

Also in the works is a site re-design, our first podcast, and a few other neat little things that will hopefully make your experience of this site more pleasurable and more relevant. Unfortunately, given that we have zero institutional backing, there's not a lot of money to throw at fun stuff; but we're a creative bunch if nothing else, so look forward to some interesting things coming up.

Over the past year, we've built relationships with the other entities of the City blogosphere, leading to a fertile dialogue; for example, if I had to name my favorite City blogger, it would probably be Rock Hackshaw over at Room Eight. The web of connections has been interesting; for example, the blog-murder of Gatemouth was much mourned here, more perhaps than on his own turf, even if we might have been expected to be sympathetic to it. We weren't, and we aren't. Within the confines of the small blogger community, that event stands as, in my opinion, the scandal of the year. The good news of the year, meanwhile, is the début of The Albany Project, an effort led by, among others, Brian Keeler and Phil Anderson, both of DKos renown.

The central challenge of New York City (and state) blogs is, I think, to make the political goings-on in our City and State interesting and relevant to an audience perhaps more interested in the glamour contests at the national level. It's a cold, hard fact that there isn't much of an audience for the doings of City Hall and Albany; whether that's because of the dysfunction of the entities in question, or because average citizens simply seem not to have a voice in a machine/special-interest-dominated polity, is akin to the question of who came first, the chicken or the egg. As they say, it is what it is, but we believe there is reason to be displeased with things as they are. A large part of our job, and this likely applies to local political blogs across the spectrum, is to enlargen the circle of citizens interested and engaged in local politics. I've always found it ironic that the third-largest state in the Union, and the country's largest city, seemed more interested in what was going on in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania; not to knock those fine places, or the importance of Federal elections, but there's a bit of toil to do in our own vineyard.

So, all in all, it's been an interesting year. 2007 is going to be, methinks, the year of infrastructure-building, in anticipation of the Presidential (and Congressional) contest of 2008, but also to further build this Progressive movement thing everybody's talking about. It will also be the first year of the eagerly anticipated Spitzer/Paterson administration (well, 'eagerly'; I'm 'salivating'), the first year of our newly elected Democratic Congress, the first year of what we hope and expect to be a newly invigorated Democratic majority across the country. It will be, in short, interesting, and there's much to look forward to.

But enough about all that – because this really is about you, the reader. It never ceases to amaze me – nor, likely, Liza, Mole, Daniel, Dan and Paul – that you come here and read whatever it is that it strikes us to write about. Just by the way, though we now have a managing editor – that would be me – we don't have in that sense an editorial direction, let alone oversight; you, gentle reader, get the unfiltered, raw musings of the individual editors. We're flattered, truly and without exaggeration, that you come here and spend time with us.

Thank You, and have a great New Year.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| | | | | | | |