Thursday, August 20, 2009

My new Chronicle blog, Opportunity Urbanist

The Houston Chronicle recently asked me to write a City Brights blog for them, and I couldn't say no to such a great opportunity to reach a whole new audience. I started it earlier this week and they put me on the home page the first day, which I have to say was pretty cool. I also have the option over there to react to current news stories and they will link to my reaction from the story itself, which can certainly channel a lot of additional traffic. I decided to name it "Opportunity Urbanist" to differentiate it from Houston Strategies, but the topics covered will be the same.

I plan on continuing to support both blogs. Because Houston Strategies has an email list associated with it, I'll keep the infrequent longer posts/essays over here (cross-posted there). There I'll try to do more frequent smaller posts (something that would be annoying here with my email subscribers), usually reacting to something in the news or posted on another blog (something I'd like to do more of). Seeing as it's a whole new set of readers, I'll also repost some of my older 'best of' highlight posts from the Houston Strategies archives - so if you haven't been with me since the beginning (2005), I'd recommend keeping watch over there to catch some of my better early stuff. So Houston Strategies readers and email subscribers don't miss out on the smaller posts there, I'll usually bundle them up into a single long summary post over here from time to time. I'm also well aware that Hearst can decide to shut that blog down at any time, so I want to make sure the most important content is replicated to Houston Strategies for posterity (and Google indexing and searching, of course).

I know that sounds complicated, but we'll figure it out as we go along. If you want to be sure to catch everything, just add both RSS feeds (HS, OU) to your newsreader (I'm a big fan of Google Reader).

As always, thanks for your readership and support.

Opportunity Urbanist

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9 Comments:

At 9:03 PM, August 20, 2009, Blogger Kevin Whited said...

** I know that sounds complicated **

It's overly complicated.

Why not just post EVERYTHING here, and post appropriate material there also?

Your readers might appreciate that.

 
At 9:09 PM, August 20, 2009, Blogger Kevin Whited said...

As followup....

I just went to your new Chron blog... and found lengthy excerpts of other people's writing with little added by you. Lengthy as in 10 grafs of blockquote, and two sentences from you in one post.

I think you or Hearst might have a hard time justifying those lengthy excerpts as fair use.

Is that what we should expect at the new blog?

 
At 10:09 PM, August 20, 2009, Blogger Tory Gattis said...

I don't want to over-post here because of the email list. Most everything of note over there will find it's way over here at one point or another.

The first two posts were excerpts because I happened to come across those this week, and the blog wasn't fully configured yet (mainly stats). I expect more original content in the future.

 
At 10:14 PM, August 20, 2009, Blogger Tory Gattis said...

But I'd also like to point out that, as I see it, part of my value-add is filtering through lots of content out there and bringing over the pieces that I think Houston readers will find interesting. That means not just linking, but pulling out key excerpts. There's just too much out there to read everything.

 
At 2:03 AM, August 21, 2009, Blogger Alon Levy said...

Tory, I can't see your blog posts right now. But I can see some headlines, and what you say about Texas needing to avoid the California disease is misleading. Texas is one of the best-run small government states, while California is one of the worst-run big government states. Texas also benefits from having large productive cities - it's the only state in the Sunbelt except Colorado and Nevada that's consistently a net federal tax donor, suggesting economic robustness that has little to do with policy.

 
At 7:52 AM, August 21, 2009, Anonymous kjb434 said...

Alon,

The economic robustness is due to policy that allows it to exist!

California restricts businesses so much that they have destroyed that states economy which was once the powerhouse of the US.

 
At 1:51 PM, August 21, 2009, Blogger Alon Levy said...

KJB, look at this graph plotting average tax rates versus unemployment.

 
At 1:02 PM, August 25, 2009, Anonymous kjb434 said...

Alon,

Paul Krugman is your source? I almost fell out of my chair laughing.

That man has had post more corrections for his flat our bad analysis and lies.

The Nobel Prize is definitely not what it use to be.

 
At 8:26 PM, August 26, 2009, Blogger Alon Levy said...

Forget Krugman. The graph is correct - you can check the sources he links to.

And I don't think people who defend O'Toole can honestly call Krugman names. Krugman has at least been vetted by other experts - and politics aside, he was short-odds for Nobel back in the early 2000s, purely on the strength of his economics.

 

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