Recently, I received an email from a reader who basically said, "Hey, Will, you're not really doing all that great of a job on Hokie news any more.  I'm having to wander all over the web to find stuff that I was hoping I could find at HokieCentral.   You're spreading yourself too thin, and the News and Notes section in particular is suffering for it."

Or words to that effect.

In one sense, I agree with what the person was saying to me.  I've looked back at the early days of HokieCentral, and I've been shocked to find that I used to update News and Notes almost every day.  That's amazing to me, because this web site is a lot of work, and I don't see how I could manage that.

And I used to do one or two Special Features, or "My Opinion" pieces, per month.   Now I just do one about every two months or so, it seems.

And then I remembered that back in those days, I didn't have a message board or a Sights and Sounds page, both of which have taken time away from the hardcore News and Notes stuff that I used to do.

And we won't even mention the membership stuff.  The membership concept is way more popular than I ever thought it would be, and sure, processing all those orders eats up a lot of time and results in zero content on the web site (but people wind up with some really neat stuff).  Not to mention that I expanded it this year to include Members Only areas of the web site, which means that something else is taking away time from the generation of free content, in particular, news.

So, I can't argue with what the person was saying to me.  I certainly don't cover everything here.

But whether or not News and Notes is satisfactory to you depends upon what you expect out of it.  Let's face it, the message board is the best place to pick up breaking Hokie news.  The HC message board posters are legion, as they say, and the hundreds of posters can sniff out more news in an hour - and post it - than I can in a week.

That's fine and dandy if you've got a T1 connection at work, and you take breaks every two hours and check the message board, and then you go home, fire up the home computer, and check the board once at night.  You won't miss a thing.

The Two Types of Visitors

But I'd wager that the majority of HokieCentral visitors don't stay on top of it like that.  Maybe they drop in once every two or three days.  In that case, the message board doesn't cut it, because the old messages cycle off the board long before the casual, twice-a-week visitor ever sees them.

And every once in a while, even the avid HC surfers get called away for a week or two at a time, for work-related travel or vacation.

So those folks rely on News and Notes, and that's where the web site can come up lacking.  N&N only gets updated about twice a week these days, at the most, and that's just not enough to keep people up to date on everything.  For those people, truly keeping up to date turns into a massive web-surfing exercise, where they visit all of HC's links in an effort to find out what's been going on since the last time they visited.

And that can be a drag, even when you love a subject and are willing to do the time to catch up on it.  I sympathize with that.

What Further Compounds the Problem....

So, I suppose I could keep you up to date on everything.  Twice a week, I could post a bunch of news and links in bullet form, all clear and concise, all in one place.  "Anthony Nelson didn't qualify," "Here's a link to a Richmond Times-Dispatch article on Al's knee," etc., etc.

One word:  booorrrrrinnng.  Okay, two words:  informative, but ... booorrrrrinnng.

That's just not my style.  Anyone who has visited this web site for more than two weeks knows that like most of you, I like to go off on Hokie-related stuff, often for pages at a time.  Good lord, look at what I'm doing right now.  I've been rambling on for fifteen paragraphs about nothing.

It's not just enough for me to report that Jack Bogaczyk wrote a piece about Jim Weaver and the Roanoke Civic Center, and then provide a link, and leave it at that.  I've got to report, post the link, and then spew for about three pages (or screens, or whatever).

In the interim, I've got no time to find out if Gennaro DiNapoli and Todd Washington have signed contracts.  I'm too busy examining the fine print somewhere else and telling you what I think about it.

So I'm just not cut out for bulleted news items.

What Was I Talking About?

Oh, yeah, I was going to tell you what the focus of News and Notes is, in an effort to tell you how I run the web site, what I try to make it, and what you can get out of it.

News and Notes is a forum in which I pick a hot topic (or, I make one hot) related to Hokie sports, and I report on it, sometimes not so well, and then I tell you what I think ... um, sometimes not so well.  In the process, a lot of hard news reporting just doesn't get done, especially when you consider that I'm also doing membership stuff, handing out message board passwords, doing game reports, and looking for neat stuff to scan in and post.

See, I have a hard time reporting on something unless it makes me feel or think something.  For example, I couldn't care less what the dollar value of Antonio Freeman's latest contract is, so I doubt I'm going to go look it up and report it (but for the record, a message board poster says that he has signed a one-year deal for $1.5 million).  Instead, what you'll get is in-depth commentary - maybe right, maybe wrong, but always entertaining, I hope - on the things that make me think a little bit deeper than the numbers or the facts.

So in the end, I can guarantee two things:  (1) to get all the news, you're going to have to do a little work and check out the message board or surf the links; and (2) you'll never be bored at HokieCentral.  Not if I can help it.

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