Introducing Page 2

I’m pleased to announce a new forum for long-form discussion about Greater Seattle transit and land use called “Page 2.” Although we take pride in the fact that Seattle Transit Blog’s front page maintains a high standard of discourse, that standard requires work — work that substantially limits how much reporting and opinion we can bring you.

Our solution is to open up a forum for the broader community to submit their own posts with less editorial scrutiny. This isn’t a free-for-all: submissions must relate to transit and land use, no spam is allowed, and as in the comment policy vitriolic ad-hominem attacks and other anti-social behaviors are forbidden. To support those goals, we require registration for post authors: let us know if you’d like an account. Our guest post guidelines continue to be a good set of hints on how to write effectively on STB.

If you’re here for the carefully curated writing, rest assured that this will have basically no effect on how the STB main page works. However, a nice side effect will be a streamlined system for submitting guest posts. Our intent is to take the very best from Page 2, apply whatever editing is necessary, and “promote” it to STB for distribution on our RSS and Twitter feeds, as well as getting the usual play on the front page. Alert readers may have noticed that some Page 2 posts have already appeared on the main page, indicated by the new byline for guest posts. Although for now we’re going to allow handles on Page 2, any promoted post must conform to our usual policy on real names for authors.

If you don’t have the fortitude to write long form pieces, but can’t get enough of our comment threads, I encourage you to check there every few days and see what the community has produced. We invited a few longtime commenters to start building up content there in time for launch, but what they wrote was so good that I promoted it all to the main page, so at the moment there isn’t anything there. Check back later this morning for a subject that is sure to inspire some creativity. You can certainly comment on Page 2 posts just like any other.

This new feature is entirely a product of the tireless effort of Frank Chiachiere, who had to work through several major issues and deserves all the credit for its design and implementation. Although this is an experiment and all of you will ultimately decide its success, I’m excited about it and have high hopes you’ll be excited too.