The Breitbart legacy is hitting close to home, or so it is claimed.
Now I’m not going to promise to the subject of this post that she will enjoy great fame or fortune like Andrew Breitbart did, but based on the first night of her website’s existence I can tell she does a lot of reading to get her information.
If you are a Facebook friend of mine and you read the regular updates where I pimp my most recent posts, you will oftentimes see immediately under them the phrase “JackieLynn Wellfonder likes this.” Everybody has their supporters and Jackie has been one of mine for many months, but last night she decided to step into the fray on her own. Naturally I have given her a few tips on how to handle things on the back end of her site (like me, she runs a WordPress platform) and she’s already populated her site with a few posts, including a repost of what I wrote last night.
But if all she does is repost the words of others, frankly I’d be disappointed. Even though local writers I respect like G.A. Harrison and Julie Brewington generally mix in others’ content to a greater extent than I choose to, they back it up with their own takes on local, state, and national news and politics. Given the involvement Jackie has with the Dan Bongino U.S. Senate campaign I would expect her insider perspective would be an asset to local readers, as would the learning experience and transformation she is undergoing in her life as she becomes politically involved. Perhaps those at her places of work and worship may not know about these recent moves but her website would be a place for her to address these people and any others she may come across.
As I said earlier I’d given Jackie some tips and frank advice: be diligent in adding content and develop a thick skin, because you’ll need it on occasion. Not every blogger in this town likes all the others; straight away I can think of two who won’t be singing Kumbaya together anytime soon. So you’ll probably make some enemies among bloggers and perhaps elected officials and other local leaders. Don’t take it personally.
But returning to the content advice: you’ll notice on my sidebar that I have about 90 links to local and national websites, including Jackie’s. These sites get there when they draw my attention but they stay there by posting regularly. Every so often I cull links because nothing gets my goat more than a website which isn’t kept up – usually if there’s no post newer than three months ago on the site I broom it. With literally millions of blogs out there, the competition is difficult so I demand some effort be put in – after all, I update this one at least once a day. So I would expect her to be a regular contributor on the local scene.
And it’s up to Jackie to establish an identity of her own (and market the daylights out of it.) Those who read my site regularly know I have featured some items not normally found on a typical political blog, but this is my site and I get tired of doing wall-to-wall politics. So I throw a few curveballs and changeups, like any good pitcher would. You keep coming back, don’t you? The same should apply to hers. Notice I don’t exclusively link to political sites, but I link to what I think are good sites (for the most part, anyway. See the second paragraph above.)
But this will be an opportunity that we rarely get to watch something grow. Oftentimes I stumble across a site once it has matured and been around for weeks or months, but in Jackie’s case I may be the first to link to hers. I think she’ll justify my faith in her as expressed by that quick link. And who knows – I may learn a thing or two as well.