This is going to be a quick post, but one that all long time readers should do me a favour and share on as many Facebook pages and Groups as possible, because it relates to the site and the way the site is going to present itself to its audience in the next few months.
Regular readers will not need reminding that The CelticBlog is unashamedly focussed on more than just Celtic.
Our team does not pull its punches when dealing with our own club, but we don’t pull our punches when dealing with issues outside of Celtic either.
The folk who work on this site – from myself, the editor, to the social media team who run the page and the blog and the Twitter feed, to the folk who share the articles and do sterling work keeping us visible and present, we are all proud of this site and the work that it does.
How we see the job is simple; we are relentlessly pro-Celtic.
We fight for this club every single day, whether it’s batting back against the mainstream media and the cycle of lies about Celtic or the way in which we poke at the SFA and the governing bodies.
Whether it’s our commitment to help reform those bodies or simply bringing you news and information about the club … every one of us devotes every minute of every day to Celtic related matters.
But the nature of social media does not make it easy.
The blog and its members are subject to frequent attack and slander.
We are subjected to allegations of being too close to the club at the same time as others are accusing us of undermining it … you can’t please all the people all of the time.
We are accused of being a “for profit” which “scams the fans” … in spite of never once having asked a single reader for a single penny … and we never will.
Sure, some of the bloggers get paid for what they do but the money’s not coming out of the pockets of a single reader or Celtic supporter, so why does it matter?
Some of us work harder than you’d believe.
If I’m not doing a 12-hour day most days it’s because I’m ill, and even then the chances are I’ll be in front of a computer with my blankets on.
Lately, the job has been made tougher by Facebook and the number of restrictions they put on sites and where the bloggers can share their work. These restrictions, ultimately, are what have finally given us pause in relation to how we bring this content to you.
There are basic venues for our work, where you are guaranteed to find our articles and the articles of all the other Celtic sites; on Facebook there’s The CelticBlog page (which I urge every reader to follow and like, and make sure their friends do too) and there’s also The CelticBlog group, which you have to join.
The CelticBlog is represented on Twitter, where all the articles are published and available to read.
We’re also available on Celticfcnews.com and, of course, on the peerless Celticnewsnow; for the most comprehensive news on our club which exists anywhere both of those sites should be bookmarked and their Twitter feeds should be followed by every Celtic fan.
I’m not kidding; if you haven’t bookmarked those guys do it now, without delay.
They are critical sites for every Celtic supporter.
Those guys are amongst the best friends the bloggers have … they do incredible work and without them this whole community would be a much poorer place.
These will continue to be the key venues for finding The CelticBlog’s work, and you can – of course – also subscribe on the site itself.
Follow these, and you’ll never miss an article.
There are other Facebook sites and groups which work hard to promote all of the Celtic sites and blogs; I’ll tell you right now, we could not exist without those groups and the people who run them.
This whole community owes them a great debt, because without them this community wouldn’t exist.
And there are a few groups and pages which have banned individual blogs whose editorial line they disagree with or for more personal reasons which aren’t worth going into.
Save to say, that if they want to restrict the stuff their members can view then that’s up to them, but those members who don’t like it know where we all are.
The CelticBlog has had a policy of making itself as widely available to our readers as possible, and with the help and support of group admins and page owners, we’ve done that for a long time.
But that policy is almost at its limit … Facebook’s not going to let us do it and we’re not even sure anymore that we should be doing it … we can’t keep posting on 20 different Facebook groups and pages every day.
All of the pages and groups are becoming swamped by blogs, many of them going over the same ground as others, some of them having popped up recently to regurgitate every story that appears in the mainstream press, no matter how ludicrous or lame.
The CelticBlog has always aimed for a certain quality, but there are certain pressures on all the blogs at the moment which mean we sometimes re-tread old ground, or cover each other’s work. Part of it though is the sheer difficulty of trying to locate your audience in a very crowded field where there’s a lot of white noise in the background.
With a few changes we can set higher standards than ever before, and do our jobs better than we’ve ever done them.
That’s our next big challenge.
Which is why we’re going to change how we work over the next few weeks and into the New Year.
You’ll see less of us on the Facebook groups and pages where we’ve always been visible, but that doesn’t mean we’ve gone anywhere … we’ll be where we’ve always been, on our own page, on our own group, on those of long-time friends and collaborators and on Twitter and those other sites which have done so much to promote the bloggers.
Follow all of them, and you’ll not just be supporting our blog but all the rest of them as well.
Thanks, all of you, for your own support in the past few years … this site belongs to you and it always has.
With your continued support, it’s onward friends to the next phase and the next stage and the next evolution of this site and the community.
Please bookmark The CelticBlog and the other sites suggested in this piece.