Apology And Policy Change

Before we hit the policy change...

It's almost as much a part of the blog as the news items, it seems...our regular complaints about how the comments section here at OMW gets out of hand, and occasional threats that we'll remove said comments area because of it.

This time, it was your very own Primary Editorial Voice(tm) who got out of hand, with a caustic reply to an anonymous reader who apparently wasn't very excited by news of the official approval of the sale of a Youngstown TV station.

Whoever that was, we apologize. Your brief post and use of the letter "Z" in multiple got on our last nerve this afternoon, and we should have held back instead of laying into you. (We've deleted all the comments on the below item that aren't related to the actual item, including our own diatribe.)

Our passion, though, is what led us to go off the handle.

OMW exists solely for our own personal enjoyment. Period.

We're very happy that about 1200 regular visits a day come from people who find our "news and musings" important enough to read daily. We're very appreciative of you.

But OMW is basically a very time consuming hobby for us, and the day we get no enjoyment or too much frustration out of it, our occasionally used "hiatus" will become for good. This isn't a threat or even an extension of the recently announced "hiatus", just a matter of fact based on why we even do this.

Though we've said earlier that we have basically replaced media columnists like Bob Dyer locally, we have no obligation to cater to "reader demand".

If we don't want to write something, we don't write it. If we miss something for some reason, we missed it. If we write about topics that some of our readers don't find all that interesting, we write about them.

In turn, you have no obligation to read this blog. If you're not getting what you want from what we do here, go elsewhere for your media news and musings. If enough people feel that way, our hit counts will go from four digits a day to two digits a day, and we'll "get the message".

But a reminder...unlike Mr. Dyer and his past colleagues and competitors, we don't get any money out of this. We get no paycheck. We don't sell ads, which would bring in some change and not much more.

We do it because we enjoy it, and we're happy to have whoever wants to be along for the ride.

If we don't enjoy it...well, there's a reason we picked up a reader's joke long ago and started calling this the "Mighty Blog of Fun(tm)". It's fun for us, and if it stops being so, we stop doing it.

So, in the future, we'll try our best to limit the complaining and excessive navel gazing (after this post).

But we're doing something constructive about it.

Starting immediately, OMW has been set up to not take non-logged-in anonymous comments.

From now on, if we have the comments section open on an item, it will require you to use a Google account to add a comment. This means you can use an existing Gmail account, or create a new account (or Gmail address, or both) at the Google website.

Yes, we know that won't end "anonymous" comments. We know it's trivially easy to sign up for a Google account of some sort, and it's free.

But our goal, as stated before, is to slow down some of the "drive-by" potshots that often come from these comments.

For those who ask about this, we'll say it again - the comments came with the blog. We never intended on running a quasi-message board, and for those who do like to shoot from the hip, there are other message boards dedicated to some portion of what we cover here.

OK, as said, that's enough complaining on our part...and now, action!

(Oh, we've disabled comments on this item because we don't really have time to become part of yet another "back and forth" on this. The item speaks for itself.)

--The Management