It’s been one long year readers, and I’m not gonna lie, probably the toughest in at least my life so far. In spite of (heck, because of) all the blood, sweat, and strings of profanity, I think we down at Culture War Reporters have really knocked it out of the park.
Let me break it down so that you may properly bask in our glory.
The Shame Day/Fame Day cycle and our midweek discussions were implemented late last year, so we’re only really seeing the full fruits of our labor as 2013 draws to a close. Along with Evan’s reviews of 2 Broke Girls (yes, that still pains me), our relentless salvos of biting-yet-undeniable truth have all helped us pass 100,000 views (and then some).
Our daily viewer average has also grown and is currently hovering at around what our all-time high was last year (that’s roughly 200), and speaking of all-time highs, we have utterly and wholly smashed our previous most-views-record with September 6th’s 3,081 hits. Of course I want us to continue our by-now-normal habit of vanquishing our old records and dragging them behind our chariots, but I’d also like to see us pass 15,000 for total views in a month (our current recording being about 13,000).
I also want to direct your tearful, nay, hysterical applause to Evan, who continues to outdo himself as an editor and Kat, who has really come in swinging.
And of course, audience, what end-of-the-year review would this be if it didn’t include a saccharine bow to you guys for making it all happen? You guys keep coming back, we’ll keep pumping it out. See you in 2014.
-Gordon
I was pretty excited when a childhood friend (Chris, that means you) contacted me this summer to let me know that his cousin was looking for a female writer to contribute to his blog. He thought I might be a good fit and, lucky for me, Evan and Gordon agreed. Joining the guys on CWR has really been a great time. It’s been a good discipline for me to write so regularly, plus it’s fun to get to write about the things that really interest me. Even though I’ve only been at CWR for about 6 months, it’s been exciting to see how our readership has increased even within that time.
Whenever someone asks me what would be the end goal of pursuing a degree in English I usually end up telling them, “pretty much what I’m already doing on the blog right now.” So you should probably go tell all your friends about this blog so that we can all just live the dream and write for a living. Or at least so that we can get their feedback on our posts, because we LOVE hearing back from you.
-Kat
Up above we have Gordon doing some number crunching and Kat sharing what her experience has been like so far, and I’m going to try as hard as I can not to overlap too much with their year-end blurbs.
2013 has definitely been a year of expansion for CWR. We wrote roughly twice as many posts this year and brought on a new writer. That’s all well and good, but in the immortal words of Tony Stark to Steve Rogers in Issue #1 of Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers when discussing their titular group:
But not just bigger, like the expansion of their roster to 18 heroes, but also better, like adding Shang-Chi, Master of Kung-Fu, to the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. My dream is for Culture War Reporters to one day be a place where you can consistently drop in to read what others think about today’s culture, from comic books (of course) to race issues to television to music, but in such a way that it forces you to think about it as well.
We’ve got a long ways to go, that’s clear, but just know that we’re always aiming to improve ourselves and the site as a whole. This is our third year on the internet, and as far as I’m concerned our fourth can only be better. Huge thanks to all our readers who’ve helped us get where we are today.
And yes, I’m going to finally be getting to writing those posts I promised.
-Evan
Below we have something about some sort of WordPress.com stats helper monkeys preparing a 2013 annual report for this blog:
Click the image above to gaze upon statistics for a site we hope you frequent regularly.
Culture War Reporters 