I have been hearing about the new Townhall site for weeks and weeks and have been staring at a “coming soon” announcement for two days and now finally, after a day of 4th of July festivities, I have had time to check out the new site. It was definitely worth the wait. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am now a Townhall regular weekly columnist, with a column running every Friday. All the old regular Townhall columnists are still there, with the addition of newbies like me. Townhall.com is the new home of bloggers Hugh Hewitt and Mary Katharine Ham and talk radio hosts like Bill Bennett and Mike Gallagher. There are interactive tools galore on the new site. I will probably still be discovering new features for weeks to come. Jonathan Garthwaite gives some details about the changes and additions and Mary Katharine has already been blogging there all day long. The new site promises to be a strong force in conservative politics with its action-oriented emphasis. The folks at Townhall are inviting reader feedback on the new format and features. I have already supplied mine here.
Update: Mary Katharine Ham pointed out a couple of features I had not discovered yet, including the Funnies page.
Thanks to Luke, I have now fixed the main Townhall link.
I love the new site too. I haven’t tried it yet, but I really hope the search functionality works now.
Chris
http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/
I’m concerned with the majority of conservatives rebelling against “Republican” Politicians on a couple of recent occassions, Harriet Myers & Immigration, this is an attempt for raise the “Republican” Party-bot voices above the other conservative voices. Both of those would have likely been railroaded into passing if it wasn’t for blogs. Blogs are the biggest threat against politicians just jamming something through especially if the MSM is complicit. I’m sure that’s not been lost on the politicians.
Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with that at all if that’s their goal. Unless Townhall works to that goal, but claims otherwise.
jpm100,
If you look at the Townhall site you will see that regardless of what any Townhall “goal” is, the site gives voice to READERS’ individual goals and agendas because it gives READERS the tools to contact members of congress, voice their opinions on various topics, etc.
Allow me to disagree. Usually the only thing I use townhall for are the columns…the functionality of which seems to be pretty much broken and frustrating. My daily opinion column emails now lead to broken links (making me think that every link to townhall on my blog is now broken). But the links could be corrected, right? Well, no. Some columnists appear to have disappeared, even though I got emailed the link to their column just last week, guess I won’t be reading those. No more links to the author directly from the column? I’m so unbelievably frustrated right now with this its not even funny. This was clearly launched too early, it’s not done cooking, yet.
Did they really give everything new links, making all old ones useless? Unreal.
Falze,
I have forwarded your comment on to my contact at Townhall just in case you haven’t already. I had a couple of problems getting to columns, but when I retried was able to get through. I will check about whether any of the old links will work when the system has all the kinks out of it. I agree, especially as a blogger, that it would be a mistake to toss the old links out because every blog post that linked to a Townhall column in the past would be no good. Hopefully that will not be the case.
I really appreciate that, Lorie. I was going to try to find a place to email a comment but ran out of time today. It was just so utterly frustrating to have emails in my inbox tied to columns but I only was getting ‘not authorized’ messages. Where did the ‘guest columnist’ section go? I dunno, it’s all frustrating right now.
I too have been cut off from my daily email of the latest columns, and I have not been able to find the link to subscribe to them again. Right now I am pleased with my decision not to donate more money to this site, since it has stopped giving me the very feature I previously paid for.