You know those sites that make the voices in your head screech every time you go but you just can’t keep yourself from visiting every once in a while? You know what I’m talking about here. It’s like watching the trashiest of talk shows, the goriest of “caught on film” episodes, or the most intellectually insulting sitcoms. Or that new “Showdogs Moms and Dads” show on Bravo. But online.

Maybe your self-torture runs toward the cringeworthy Rotten.com, or the strangely entrancing Whowouldbuythat.com. Or you get your rocks off on politically-charged head rush endorphins by looking at propaganda sites like The Heartland Institute, Town Hall, or The Family Research Council.

This week mine has been visiting the Duke City Fix every day. I said I was hopeful about the project but that doesn’t mean I’m an idealist. And if I didn’t genuinely care about it I would’ve visited once, scoffed, and never gone back. On the surface I’ve never been much of a proponent for tough love but I guess I have been known to give the people I trust and care more about more shit than those I wouldn’t poke with a long stick - because I respect them and trust that they respect me enough to take my opinion seriously. My criticisms about the site aren’t meant to be dismissive of the project - in fact, I really hope that, since I seem to be heard by a few of those involved, what I say here might actually make a difference.

With a few exceptions, it’s been pretty clear to me that while there was a whole lot of technical planning for the site infrastructure and design (both are great, btw, but I do get a bit annoyed having to do a captcha word with every comment - Maybe if there’s the ability to create a membership and avoid it - although I have no experience with the Nucleus publishing software they’re using so maybe not) there’s still a lot of work to be done on who the site’s audience is and focusing on what exactly they want to tell that audience.

This is a basic facet of writing and is required in publishing. When I worked for Woman Santa Fe magazine in 1997 a good part of our meetings were about defining this exact subject and how well our features, sidebars, and even our advertising fit in to that target readership.

From what Chantal, the editor, told me in her email, it’s aimed towards people who go “out and about” in Albuquerque. Well, I have to say that the last two posts from this admitted agoraphobic have had more to do with going out and about in Albuquerque than the articles that have been on there the last few days. There has been a post about how personal hygiene affects one’s success (if you’d want it) with a surface-oriented person on a date (and I’ve been told that there was an article about this exact subject in the Albuquerque Journal last month!), a great and gigantic article about free press, editorialism, and funding, and an editorial about an executive level weed pulling day for the City of Albuquerque with fudged statistics. That one about the weeds got a whole lot of comments. Which were then closed.

Duke City Fix is a cityblog by the people, for the people??

I’m starting to wonder if the people behind this (whom I don’t already know do so) have ever published anything on the web. If you’re going to accept comments you’re not always going to have control over them, that’s just how it goes. And that’s the beauty of accepting comments from the general public - issues will come up the writers had never thought of. But the general rule of thumb is to let the comments go until there’s serious threatening or trolling going on. And then it’s preferable to target and zap the troll not the comments. So if the comments are going to get shut down like that I’m wondering what the point of accepting comments is.

I’ll admit I’ve thought a lot of things about this site - and a lot of them haven’t been pleasant and probably overly critical. But the editor lost a lot of my respect by bringing up such a potentially heated subject (money, politics, and government is guaranteed to bring out strong opinions) then shut the comments down even when they hadn’t gotten that uncivilized. So the editor wanted to post an editorial to get our hackles up about using city funds for a thinly-veiled re-election campaign without facts other than what she directly observed yesterday morning and vague guessing without providing the public a chance to respond openly and without fear of reprisals.

The ability to publish opinions and make them freely available to the public is the point of publishing an independent web-based media, right?

I really wonder now who this site is for. Is it for the authors (who apparently were random website picks and personal friends of the creator) to have a place to talk about the kind of stuff they could be talking about on their own personal sites? Just, like, whatever they feel like writing (from dirty fingernails to armageddon themed mailers) with no accountability or consistency?

There’s been this whole weblog vs. the mainstream media argument going on ever since before the presidential election. Talk about making weblogs more accountable for what they publish. Which, for the most part, isn’t necessary because the weblog world tends to self-regulate and do the fact-checking. Publishing provocative articles without any established facts then not allowing the public to respond freely is a great way to present argumentative fodder for those who support cracking down on weblog regulation and accountability.

On a personal site all executive decisions are up to the main person. Their blog their rules. But group weblogs (particularly those who are claiming to represent an independent cross-section of a whole damn town) should follow a different set of rules. The argument has been made that since there are so many writers the subject can’t be controlled. Not buying it. There are very easy ways to make it so an article by a certain member isn’t immediately published and has to be approved by the editor. A bit controlling, yes, but probably a necessity to protect the integrity of the site - and no less so than the seemingly random number and recruitment of the writers.

So is the Duke City Fix (a name my native husband seems to resent highly in that he thinks that the name itself implies that a bunch of outsiders are offering their graced opinions on how to fix a broken city - but a name I defended to him as more of a jokey heroin slang thing) for people who’ve never been to Albuquerque? I wonder this because if you read the site odds are you know about the Frontier already. If you don’t know about the Frontier and you live in Albuquerque then you probably won’t be reading the site. I tried to be kind in my comment about The Frontier being the Cafe du Monde for Albuquerque because I’m genuinely trying to encourage this lofty ideal of keeping things positive about Albuquerque. Even if the woman who told me about the ideal wasn’t doing it either when she wrote a critical presumptive article then shut down the comments.

I like to think of myself as a constructive criticizer though. And I can’t stress enough my high hopes for the site. (Again, if I didn’t care I wouldn’t waste my precious relaxing knitting time writing about it)

These are my suggestions to make it appear as a more representative independent group weblog: