Over the weekend, we officially passed the fifth anniversary of the creation of The Carpetbagger Report, so I thought I’d take a moment to offer a quick note of thanks to readers. (I generally avoid navel-gazing posts; consider it a once-a-year-indulgence. Besides, as far as the blogosphere goes, five years seems like a fairly significant milestone.)<\/p>\n
To borrow a presidential cliche, the State of the Blog is strong. Over the last year, traffic has grown at a surprisingly fast clip, and the comments section has flourished into a spirited community. The relative success of the blog has led to a variety of other terrific opportunities for me over the last year, including, much to my surprise, a short film<\/a>. We also unveiled a redesigned home page over the last year, which has not only improved the look and feel of the site, but which seems to have been met with near-universal approval from readers.<\/p>\n As for major changes for The Carpetbagger Report as we enter Year Six … I don’t plan on making any. I sometimes wonder what, if anything, I should consider to take the blog “to the next level” — diaries? videos? partnerships with other bloggers? — but in general, I’m pretty satisfied. To be sure, if a major media outlet asked me to write an in-house blog (a la Drum, Sullivan, Greenwald, Yglesias), I’d welcome the opportunity, but in the meantime, I’m not going anywhere. If you keep reading, I’ll keep writing.<\/p>\n And to reiterate a point I emphasize every year about this time, I’d also like to take a moment to thank all of you for being here. Whether you’ve been reading for five years or five days, it’s a real honor.<\/p>\n I appreciate your interest, support, and encouragement, and I’m grateful that so many of you are willing to peruse my daily tirades.<\/p>\n And now, back to the news….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the weekend, we officially passed the fifth anniversary of the creation of The Carpetbagger Report, so I thought I’d take a moment to offer a quick note of thanks to readers. (I generally avoid navel-gazing posts; consider it a once-a-year-indulgence. Besides, as far as the blogosphere goes, five years seems like a fairly significant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}