Divided attentions

I’ve taken on a new initiative and I thought it was time to tell you about it.

The reason it’s been six days since I’ve written a post doesn’t really have anything to do with what I’m about to tell you. It doesn’t have to do with coronavirus, either, you’ll be glad to know. (Though I can see why your mind might have gone there, considering that my last post was about the virus.) Actually, it has mostly do with being out of town for 48 hours over the long Labour Day weekend here in Australia, and then feeling a bit like I’ve been playing catch-up since then.

However, I do suspect that what I’m about to tell you could lead to a reduction in my posting to The Audient. I’ll just have to see how it goes.

So that thing is: My blogging/film posting attentions are now divided between two film websites.

No, I haven’t started a new website. I’ve taken over one that might have died without me.

ReelGood (reelgood.com.au) is where I have been writing reviews for the past five-plus years, starting with my review of Birdman in late 2014. It’s also where I’ve been podcasting for nearly that amount of time, though quite intermittently and sometimes with breaks of as long as six months between episodes.

The thing is, the guy who has been running that site does not have the time to do it anymore. He’s in grad school to become a professor and I can certainly understand why that limits his bandwidth.

Without him putting up posts, the content there would quickly go stagnant. And more importantly, without him paying the (minimal) monthly cost to keep the lights on, they would go dark.

That’s where I come in.

I’m taking the reins from him on running the site. That means not only posting my own reviews, but posting his (I hope), as well as finding new writers and ways to grow the site.

In any case, I expect it to take a lot of time, if I want to do it decently.

Let the site die? No way. This is the site that is currently legitimizing me as a film critic, not to mention allowing me to continue getting my annual critics card that allows me to see movies for free. No way I am consigning it to the dust bin of history. 

Now, most of what I write on The Audient is not appropriate for that site anyway. No one coming to a proper website that isn’t focused around my personality wants to read my arcane lists and rambling posts about viewing coincidences. No one wants to hear funny movie opinions held by my kids or why Tangled is the best movie of the 2010s.

That’s good news. It means there will always be a place in my blogging brain for Audient-specific content, and I have no immediate or long-term plans to stop running this site or merge it with ReelGood.

It does mean, however, that it’s perhaps inevitable that I’ll need to devote some of the energy I devote to The Audient to ReelGood instead. It likely means longer breaks between posts and certainly no streaks of productivity like earlier this year, when I posted for a very biblical 40 straight days.

That said, the quantity of my writing on The Audient has always been a function of what I’m inspired to write based on what happens to me in the course of my day-to-day interactions with film. So working for another site does not rule out a 40-day writing binge either.

Anyway, it’s too early to say how much one site will cannibalize the other. I certainly won’t cross-pollinate, as it’s (at least informally) against internet rules to post the same content on two different websites. But there may be posts I would have previously written for The Audient – say, that most recent post about James Bond getting coronavirus – that I will now feel it better serves me to post there, rather than here.

So stand by … we’ll see how it all goes.