Sorry for the double post, but seeing the latest news update reminded me of something - namely, that you guys cheat
. I guess there is some sense in spreading out the news updates so that there is something every day, but the fact remains that if you were to publish news as soon as you are able to, you definitely wouldn't have news every day. I mean, the ArmEdit news article posted today... Whiplash posted about that something like two weeks ago. It's kind of not really news any more
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I've thought on this subject many times, and you can call it what you want, but I do consider us to be publishing the news "as soon as we are able to" and as good as we ever have.
Sometimes the thing we report on happened in the past, but at the end of the month, we're still reporting on 30ish things that happened in 30ish days.
We've pretty much always reported on things "when we get to them." In the 1998-2002 timeframe, we might go a few days without news and then batch eight or so posts into a Saturday when we got around to it. And our updates were sometimes more simplistic than we post today: "This place wrote an article on WC, go see it." "This mod posted some new pictures, here they are." (and actually, we posted very few pictures!)
But around 2003, we really committed to getting something out on the front page every single day, since that drives a rhythm that a community can rely on. Every Wingnut in the world can load up the CIC every 24 hours and expect to see something different at the top of wcnews.com. I've been recognized in public by CIC readers who've stopped me to say this means so much to them that somebody cares enough to write about WC ever day, which is why we keep doing it. This forcing function actually often gets news out to the readers in a more timely manner than the way we originally did it. When things are timely or breaking, we'll report on them quickly. And then in our drive to make sure there is absolutely something in the news every day, sometimes we have to dig deeper. Sometimes we'll find a creative angle on something that wouldn't otherwise be newsworthy or we'll point something out that was newsworthy but would be equally so whether it was posted this month or next. Or we'll touch on a project or group that has been keeping busy - not necessarily doing a thing that qualifies as breaking news - but by virtue of still being consistently active, even if that last activity was a week or two back, we'll share it because it's still worth bringing to everyone's attention.
And I think we're do a lot more investigation than is obviously apparent. What might turn into a few sentences, some links and a picture could easily represent two hours of searching for something to write about, learning about/reading up on that thing, and then beating back the inevitable writer's block (sometimes coming up with a headline at the end is the most exhausting part!). The entire staff either has kids or some crazy 12-hours-per-day job (or both). Nobody who comes to the CIC has the free time that they did when the site opened in 1998 - so we only have the capacity to pump about one story out per day. We don't write half a dozen posts on the weekend and parse them out over the week. This is our everyday hobby. While we keep a running list of things that could potentially turn into few news posts (and some of them never do), in most cases, things like that Armada Editor update are really as new to me on the day we posted it as they are to the rest of the CIC readers who don't keep up with all the activity at the CIC Forums.
