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* an introduction, and an update...

You may have noticed that a new blog has shown up on our homepage alongside the ones Grant and I have been doing for a few years now. If you've been a longtime reader of our print publication, the name David Cantwell will not be new to you, as he'd been a No Depression senior editor since...well, since we started having senior editors. I'm not sure if his writing appeared in every single issue of ND, but if not, it was pretty darn close. He also co-authored, with fellow ND senior editor Bill Friskics-Warren, the fine book Heartaches By The Number: Country Music's 500 Greatest Singles. We're quite pleased to have David aboard.

You may also have noticed that we've re-tagged the personal-blogs section as "ND Columnists" -- the notion being that what we're seeking to provide in our respective web-havens on the ND site is perhaps more akin to the thoughtful and extended writing long done by columnists, as opposed to the more off-the-cuff and link-related text which has come to be common on the blogosphere. Call 'em our "blogs" still, if you wish -- we probably still will at times as well, from force of habit -- but it's our goal to give you writing that consistently delves deeper than just scratching the surface or pointing you in another direction.

Finally, just to keep you updated as to what all we're up to on the web-front: You may have heard us discuss, either here or in our final issue or in various media reports, our plans for a significantly revamped website. Things are still on-course for that expansion; what you're seeing here, for the moment, are merely small steps toward the major overhaul which we will unveil in the fall. Such full-scale rebuilds take time not just to plan but to execute, but rest assured that we're well into working on it. Meantime, we'll continue adding a few new things here and there on the current site, such as more reviews and new columnists and perhaps a couple other trial-balloons as well.

And we'll also be back in-print this autumn via our first "bookazine" with University of Texas Press, as announced in our final print issue (and on this site a few weeks ago). What seems like down-time is in fact very much gearing-up time, and we're very much looking forward to sharing the fruits of it all with y'all in the fall....

adios,
peter

Posted by peter on June 8, 2008 12:42 PM | Permalink