The Valley Indy’s podcast, “Navel Gazing,” makes a triumphant return this week for a new, long overdue episode. Because it’s so long overdue, we made it a threefer on a trio of hot-button issues.
First, we discuss a jokey Facebook post we made about Ted Nugent that touched off scores of comments from offended readers, many of them critical of our view that Ted Nugent sucks — not necessarily for his political views, but for his overrated music.
From that unpopular opinion, we shift to talking about how we report car accidents.
There are unfortunately so many accidents every day that we could report pretty much exclusively on them, and probably get a bump to our web traffic if we did so. But if we did that we wouldn’t have time to do much anything else, so for that and other reasons we can’t report every detail of every crash we hear about.
We close the episode by discussing news that broke this week that Patch, the network of hyperlocal news sites owned by AOL, will apparently be laying off hundreds of people beginning Aug. 9.
It’s terrible when anyone loses his or her job, and we know many good reporters currently employed by Patch.
In discussing the company’s current problems, we touch on some of the analysis offered on why what’s happening to the company is happening (including this informative piece from CT News Junkie with links to several viewpoints), and also offer our perspective from working at a hyperlocal news site, albeit a nonprofit which doesn’t have to beg advertisers for revenue — just philanthropic foundations and, we hope, readers like you.
Finally — here’s some Grand Funk Railroad.
