Clio’s Current Schedule Update

We’ve always been open at Clio’s Current about the process and purpose of this blog. Explaining to our readers the choices we make and the reasons behind them is an important part of our mandate. As much as possible, we try to draw back the curtain to the decisions we make as content creators.  After all, as content consumers, you have a vital role in that process one way or another.  So let’s talk about our most recent decision.

Today we are announcing that we will be changing to a once-a-week posting schedule.  This may be a long-term change or only for a couple of months. This blog was started a year and a half ago on 1 July 2013.  Since then, Clio’s Current has been updating twice a week and we’ve been pleased with the regularity of our content.  We’ve written for 71 weeks (minus a couple of breaks) and produced around 140 blog posts since we started. Our average post is about 1,000 words, so that’s some 140,000 words of historical blog content! 

Despite this success, taking a step back is important for us.  One of the unfortunate realities of graduate student life is busy schedules.  Sometimes posts have been rushed and contain typos and grammar errors – we know these are out there as much as you do!  By going to a once-a-week schedule, we can revise and edit our posts more closely and rid ourselves of any embarrassing mistakes.

It’s also become apparent after a year and a half that the regularity of our content, while appreciated by our core readership, does not greatly affect the larger picture.  In the digital world today, a single post can garner more views than every other post that month – the internet is more about links through Twitter or Reddit, and less about regularly visiting websites.  We began our twice-a-week posting schedule with the belief that it would draw readers back to the site regularly.  We can now say that this is definitively not the case – so we might as well ease our work schedules and improve the quality of the posts we do deliver.

Other small changes will appear in the coming months, which we will talk about as they occur, or after a few weeks as we see what impact they have.  As we have said before, Clio’s Current is a work in progress as we try to understand how history can be informatively presented in the digital age.  We will keep you up to date as we try new things and new ways of talking about history!