Letters to the editor 7/28/2005
A flood of mail, by A.V. Club standards anyway, poured in after we posted the redesigned site yesterday. So let's waste no more time and get right to 'em.
Our first letter came from Trista, who wasted no words:
"the new site sucks, and i especially miss the alphabetized search functions that made finding music and movie reviews so handy."
And we miss the days when people took time to capitalize, Trista, but what are you gonna do? As for the alphabetized search functions, we think the new search engine is a much better way to access the archives, but you're not the only person to complain. We'll look into it.
Craig writes:
"Why no TV reviews?"
He might have written more, but we had a brief period when we were only getting blank e-mails beneath subject lines. Anyway, there's something to be said for brevity. Why no TV reviews? It's mostly a matter of space and time. There's no shortage of TV-watching and opinionating within the A.V. Club staff and we do feature occasional TV review sidebars. We'd love to do more and I'm sure you'll be seeing lots of TV talk on the blogs. We also opened up a TV area on the message boards for that reason.
[Sidenote about message boards: Currently users can't start topics. This is a glitch. It will be corrected.]
From the same period, Betsy writes:
"The redesign"
Yes. The redesign. We received a similar e-mail later in the day. I responded saying it was blank. The reader wrote back to say that was probably for the best since it was nothing but complaints about the new site. Is this how Betsy feels too? Betsy, if you're out there, let us know.
Mateo on the other hand, sent an unmistakable message with the accidentally truncated e-mail:
"Love the new design!"
Me too, Mateo. Readers seem mixed on it, but we kind of expected that. So far we've gotten complaints about the color, the navigability, and the mere presence of a blog. It's all here to stay, however. Some of the complaints about the blog raise the concern that it will change the focus of the site. That's not the idea at all. No one plans to start posting diaries online. It's a pop culture blog. If the new Harry Potter makes Josh Modell cry you might hear about it, but Josh's general weepiness will remain his own business. There will certainly be more personal reflection and first-person writing here than in the A.V. Club proper (which has none and won't; it's part of what sets us apart) but we're not going to lose focus. This is a just a looser, less formal variation on the A.V. Club theme. Think of it as A.V. Club: After Hours.
That's the gist of it, anyway. Keep writing and we'll keep answering.
-Keith