CUL-DE-SAC

This blog hasn’t been in business for very long. But it has prospered and is about to move to a more fashionable address. Later this month, Cul-de-sac will be renamed “On-ramp” and will become a blog at KPBS.org.

That means it will be more of a collaborative effort. I will have editors to please and a large body of journalistic work, done by KPBS reporters and producers, to consider and play off of. But On-ramp will still be a blog by me. It’ll be my continued effort to write a mix of commentary and reportage that tells good stories and trades in big ideas.

One thing that will surely change will be the greater importance of you. My gentle readers will be asked to help carry on an endless conversation on the topics of the day.

Everybody talks about the interactivity of the Internet. But I learned the art of journalistic interactivity by spending ten years as a talk radio host at KPBS. We want On-ramp to be a kind of talk show on the Internet, which we’ll do with your help… yours and that of many more readers who will materialize thanks the greater exposure of that fashionable address I mentioned above.

But why On-ramp?

I sent out a staff email to ask co-workers what they thought would make a good blog name and I immediately regretted it. I’d forgotten how easily amused people are when they think about my last name. One suggestion was the highly derivative “Fudge Report.” One member of the KPBS newsroom invested a huge amount of creative energy in the search for a blog name. He compiled a list of ideas that included:

Food for Fudge. First-person Fudge. Random Fudge. Fudge at Large. Free Fudge. Fudge Rocker. Fudgesicle.

Strange to say we didn’t choose any of them. A select committee and I settled on On-ramp because it sounded cool and punchy. It evoked freeway images that speak to daily life in San Diego. For me it also suggested that readers would enter a fast-moving traffic of stories and ideas. I have wondered whether the blog needs some kind of tag line.

“On-ramp — to a freeway of ideas!” What do you think? Too corny?

I’m told our Internet construction engineer will need a couple of weeks to build the blog site. (Does he need to order concrete and rebar?) So it’ll be up and running soon enough. It’s website will be KPBS.org – slash – somethingoruther.

In the meantime I’ll still be at tfudge.com, writing Cul-de-sac about our home in San Diego, where roads comes to an end. Hopefully using the on-ramp will get us further down the line.

This entry was posted on August 10, 2010 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.