About the new site

Welcome to the new and — I think you'll soon agree — improved TV Barn.

It was at least four years ago, maybe five, that Dinn Mann and I first had discussions about bringing my Web site in-house and making it part of KansasCity.com. Dinn soon left for MLB.com, but over the years the conversation continued with various editors, both at the Kansas City Star and Knight Ridder Digital.

Even back then I wanted to move TV Barn to KansasCity.com. No one ever said "no" to the idea; it just took a while to make a reality. Today I'm excited to turn a new page in my career as an online journalist.

You may be asking, "Aaron. Don't you mind giving up the editorial independence you had with TV Barn?"  Sorry, but I've never seen it that way. I gave up my editorial independence on January 2, 1997, when I joined the staff of the Kansas City Star. No, the reason I set up TV Barn is that my readers on the Internet were having trouble finding my stories on the old kcstar.com. Also, I wanted to close down my email newsletter devoted to late-night television, so the timing was perfect.

It started out as a blog (before there were blogs), then mutated into other forms. While I've always taken a lot of pride in TV Barn, I have never been entirely satisfied with it, as you might have guessed from the many redesigns. Lately, I've been worried that TV Barn looks too much like the zillions of other TV reference pages and blogs out there (and indeed, readership for the site appears to have plateaued, according to usage stats).

I felt the only way to move forward with TV Barn was to go back to blogging -- but this time, a blog that was fully integrated with my newspaper work. That merger of electronic and print journalism is, of course, exactly what many media forecasters say must happen if newspapers are to remain relevant in the 21st century.

Thanks to my editor-in-chief Mark Zieman, I now have a license to blog at work. I believe you'll see new energy going into TV Barn as I expand my beat into areas that are well suited to online journalism. Watch what happens, and let me know what you think.

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Let's go over some of the changes you'll see at the new TV Barn.

Comments

You can comment on any post made to the new TV Barn. Comment mode is moderated, which means you won't see your comment until I've approved it. So be civil. However, registering is optional, meaning you are free to post anonymously.  (You can even send me an anonymous news tip without using email: just post a comment and type "NOT FOR PUBLICATION" somewhere in your message.)

Ticker

The blog will incorporate Ticker, though all items will be written by me. Just like in the old days.

I've thanked Mark Jeffries, Paul Murray, Steve Rhodes, and my anonymous contributors to the Ticker privately, and I'd like to tip my hat to them publicly as well. They spent hundreds of hours posting links to my site, and I know many of you appreciated having them. However, I felt Ticker was achieving diminishing returns as more and more TV-related news feeds were sprouting up on the Net. So the news items you see here will almost certainly have comment or instant analysis accompanying them. Hence the name I've given to the category tag: News and Comment.

I know some of you visit TV Barn frequently to look at the Ticker. I think the new TV Barn will keep you coming back just as often.

Article links

All links to articles I write for the Kansas City Star will go to KansasCity.com. Which means you will have to be registered to read my articles. That's the big tradeoff, I suppose, though it has never seemed like much of a tradeoff to me. Especially since registering at one RealCities site (whether kansascity.com or ohio.com or miami.com or philly.com, etc.) will create an account honored at all the rest of them. Try doing that with Advance newspaper web sites.

TV Barn's TV Picks

The Remote Patrol list will continue under Tom Heald's and Jon Delfin's direction, but will no longer include capsules of mine. Jon and Tom have toiled for years to make these capsules both distinctive and comprehensive, and I hope you'll continue to read them. I'll keep a link to them on the home page. (Also, if you use the tvbarn.com/remote link, that's down temporarily.)

tvbarn2

There is a static link to the tvbarn2 discussion list, but I've discontinued the blogroll of latest topics. You can, however, subscribe to it yourself from the tvbarn2 Google Groups Feeds page.

Trackbacks

These have been around half a decade and I still really don't know how they work. But I see them on people's blogs and I figured, now's the time to start adding them to mine. So, those of you who can, trackback away!

Spotlight posts

You'll notice there's a new blogroll. It will trap articles that I've tagged with a "Spotlight" tag because they have some lasting value after they've rolled off the main blog area. Mom's obituary comes to mind, as does the upcoming Fall season package.

Categories and calendar

These are self-explanatory additions. You've seen 'em on a million blogs, you'll see 'em here.

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That's it for now. I'll be hard at work building the site over the coming weeks, so check back often. (Francis will be hard at work watching me.)

-- Aaron