Donald Trump sideshow huckster or real candidate?

This image and headline of Donald Trump came across the Citizen Facebook page this morning. It is from The Onion. So, I wondered if the person who posted it wanted me to put this on The Citizen, or if they just thought it was funny? I have not heard back from this person as of this posting.

I thought it was funny.

Then again, I think a lot of things are funny, or just interesting, like this Honey Badger video —that around six million people have now watched! Presumably, five-million of those viewers were twelve year old boys.

So, why am I posting all this profanity-laden weirdness this morning? First of all it’s the weekend, and I am praying that Citizen readers are in agreement that we have more important issues to talk about than Obama’s birth certificate. Devastating tornadoes, the economy and war come to mind.

This week a group of nice folks came to us for advice on how to start a version of the Citizen in their community. Their motivation was simply that their town was too conservative and they felt it needed a publication to counter the local right wing media (last summer in a town larger than Salida, the local Dems parade float went down Main Street and was booed the whole way). In addition to some technical input they wanted to better understand our philosophical approach and our model for success. hint: strong coffee.

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe all they wanted was technical information? I just fed them our philosophical approach in a blathering of zealotoric emotion. —damn, I did it again.

We explained that if they wanted to change the dialogue they needed to reach people of all stripes and, as Ghandi puts on the coffee cups he sells “be the change you want to see.” It’s a difficult way to live, especially if you hate plastic.

So, how can the Citizen be improved? How can we efficiently create or distribute valuable content that makes our community better? We’re interested in what you want to see us post this summer and beyond. We could create a lot of content from the crap that arrives in our e-mail inbox alone. There are plenty of web sites and blogs based on this model. However, I’m going to go out on a limb, like Honey Badger, and say that the reason you visit the Citizen is because we don’t post everything and anything. We try to make things local.

As a reminder, we don’t have reporters. We depend on you to send us the content you see. Sometimes we get a great article or essay, but usually we receive random letters and press releases. One observation I have made about the Citizen, and other small citizen journalism sites, is that people will make almost any story local via the comment stream. So, perhaps we can be more oblique in our postings, rather than wait for articles. Would you like to see us post a question about ranching, dancing, water rights or the City Council seats that are available? We could see what people say in the comment stream? It might be a curious way to create content since many of you do not send in articles, but are apparently itching to comment on what others post.

What determines success for those that keep the Citizen live is feeling that we are helping to create a better informed community; a community that can work through issues intelligently. We explained to those would-be-web-publishers that creating a tool to educate  the community was not a “left” or “right” approach, and we never intended to create a liberal or conservative online newspaper. I think they got it.

The Citizen is a tool for communication and education, but to make the Citizen valuable we need you. You can shape this web site. After all, we built it for you, but not because of your politics. We built it because we believe that making a better world requires good communication and education —and that this starts at home.

Trey and I appreciate all input about our little project. Unfortunately, we cannot produce a certificate proving that we know what we’re doing.

Then again, Honey Badger don’t care.

How can we best create content that matters to you?

(I wrote this from moi’ and I refer to Trey, probably against his wishes, but there needs to be a shout out to Steve Stucko for all of his work keeping this thing singing in the last year).