DING DONG! Merrily on high, but also as in: the sound of a doorbell! Who's there? It's a delivery person and they are happy to deliver, leave on your doorstep or hand to a neighbour you've never met… A new Popjustice website!
I'll be honest, it gets to the point with this whole running-a-website thing where you either fiddle with the layout or shut the fucker down, and as you can see I've gone for the former so here's what happening:
- The front page blog is back! I enjoyed Popjustice most when there was a blog on the front page, and I think you probably did too, so in a bold and exciting attempt to retread former glories, Popjustice's front page is now a blog again. You can take the website out of the early-2000s but you can't take the early-2000s out of the website, etc etc etc.
- Speaking of the early-2000s, here's an article about how much pop has changed in the last 18 years. It's pretty eye-opening.
- 'Content' is now pretty much just split into two categories — The Briefing and Features. The latter is interviews and long stuff, and the former is everything else. So no separate videos or songs sections — moving forward everything will probably just be in one feed, like in the good old days before social media annihilated blogs and all journalism.
- Seriously though — a blog! In 2018! (Basically about ten years ago I rejigged Popjustice and made it bigger, but bigger really just ended up meaning unmanageable. This time round I'm deliberately trying to make the site-slash-blog smaller.)
- I still haven't quite figured out how to knock the whole 'we' thing on the head — it was only ever part of how Popjustice was written because 'back in the day' I felt people going "I think this, I think that" in their music writing was a bit dated, but a) that was almost twenty years ago, and now everyone writes in the first person, so actually avoiding being dated in itself is quite dated, or something, and b) going "we" is actually far worse than going "I", isn't it? Tough habit to break, though. Let's see how this one plays out.
Feedback is welcome at [email protected]. If things are broken, please tell me. If things are great, please tell me. If things aren't so great please keep your thoughts to yourself and spend the Christmas period learning about the management of expectations.