For the last three years this blog has been posted at the Keloland website Issues Blog, along with Cory Heidelberger, David Newquist, and others. Today I learned that Keloland has decided to fire us, with lots of appreciation and five days notice. Here is what passes for an explanation:
We have spent the past few months reviewing the traffic and format of our pages at KELOLAND.com. I am sure that you have noticed several changes over the past year, including the removal of our Forums section in favor of Facebook Comments at the end of selected stories; as well as the addition of a newly-formatted video player. These are just a few of the adjustments that have been made to ensure that KELOLAND.com continues to be South Dakota's #1 website.
Among the changes we have discussed is the removal of the Issues Blog section under KELOLAND Blogs. We have decided to eliminate this section due to the low number of regular contributions and our desire to take the site in a different direction. This is certainly not a reflection of the quality of your work and we appreciate all you have done to provide content to our website. I anticipate that this change will take place on Wednesday, January 12.
Well, I suppose we can hardly compete with a newly-formatted video player, let alone Facebook, but I confess I am a bit confused about the "low number of regular contributions". Scrolling back a little way, I notice multiple posts almost every day. Only Christmas day, I think, had no posts.
Hosting a forum for dedicated if amateur journalists alongside the professionals struck me as a good use of a new medium. It brought together some of the state's best bloggers at one location, and gave readers a chance to view some interesting opinions and occasionally some lively debate. I flatter myself that we provided some content that was at least as interesting as a video about the Last Stop CD Shop expansion. Apparently that cool new video player is of greater value. To judge the value of this forum (you have until Wednesday), you might go back to September and October of last year, when Cory and I were fencing over the Rasmussen poll. I would dare to say that you could have learned more about the election, and certainly about local elections, from Cory Heidelberger's posts alone than from the rest of South Dakota's #1 Website.
I thank my readers, especially those who chose to leave comments. Pretty much everything I have posted here can also be seen at my primary blog: http://southdakotapolitics.blogs.com/. If you have been reading me here, you can continue to read me there.
I can also enthusiastically recommend Cory Heidelberger's Madville Times, David Newquist's Northern Valley Beacon, Doug Wiken's Dakota Today, Joel Rosenthal's South Dakota Straight Talk, and the Radioactive Chief (great title!). If I left any blogger active on this site, I apologize.
So goodbye and good night, Keloland.
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