When I first started the Great Detectives of Old Time Radio, I began writing weekly articles. For a while, when I was in my 29 and until my early 30s, I was posting two articles per week. These posts came into a wide remit: They discussed old-time radio, detective stories, classic films, classic television, and even detective-themed graphic novels. Now, after more than 15 years, it’s time to end these weekly articles. In this post, we’ll talk about why I started them, a little bit of history, why I kept them going, why I’m ending them, and a little bit about what we’re going to do instead.
Why I Started and How It Went
I started the Great Detectives of Old Time Radio in the stone age of podcasts, where a common piece of advice was to have a blog to go along with your podcast. I jumped right in. I wrote about 1980s Perry Mason movies, Columbo episodes, Monk TV episodes, religious audio dramas, and Nero Wolfe novels. Doing this podcast and the related blog allowed me to dive into things I’d always been interested in and to write about them at length.
I not only had fun, but the blog posts succeeded, at least in getting traffic to the website. So many days I’d look at my stats and see my article ranking Columbo episodes or Monk episodes or Perry Mason episodes being some of my top-viewed articles. Google liked me, it liked me a lot.
Not only that, many people found my articles useful in their own work. I found a handful of books on Google Books that cited me in their bibliography. In one amusing incident, I was checking Google Books to find if there was any additional information on the radio series The Adventures of Babe Ruth that I didn’t have before I recorded an episode of the Old Time Radio Snack Wagon. I found a book that cited a review I wrote of the series.
I’ve enjoyed most of the books, movies, and radio shows I’ve had to consume to write these reviews. In addition, the nice little bits of research have made for diverting rabbit holes where I’ve often found myself surprised by what I’ll find while doing research.
It’s been fun, but it’s time for a change.
Why It’s Ending
I’d say there are two reasons why this is ending. Part of it has to do with the time commitment of putting out something every week My life has changed a whole lot since I was in my late 20s. For one thing, I’m a dad, and I’m working from home full time. The podcast and this website is part of my business, and writing and researching these articles is a time-consuming process. There are simple reviews I might bang out in an hour, but some of the more complex projects might take multiple hours of research and writing to do. It’s a big ask and a big time commitment.
And sometimes, I just can’t do it. While most weeks, I post something original, there have been some weeks where I haven’t posted anything or did a last-minute repost of an old article (an admitted upside of having such a big archive). With everything else, I have weeks where it’s a struggle.
Now, if this were something essential, or doing what articles did for the site back in the 2010s, it would fall me to find some way to make it happen.
But that brings me to the second problem. The articles just aren’t getting traffic anymore. The reason? It all comes down to Google. Back in the 2010s, most of my traffic to articles came from Google search. That’s just not happening anymore. The issues that people raise with Google and how search engines work are well-known and my articles just aren’t getting that traffic from search engines. This has been particularly frustrating with series that I really put a lot of work into, like “The American Audio Drama Tradition” which just didn’t get the results I wanted.
So, in short, weekly articles are becoming more challenging to produce and they’re also not serving the purpose they were intended to. So in light of that, ending the weekly articles makes sense.
What Comes Next?
Does that mean that I’ll stop writing about all the things I’ve enjoyed writing here? No, but the way I write about them is going to change.
In May, I’ll be launching a free newsletter. I’ll talk more about the newsletter next week, but one virtue is that it won’t be weekly, so I won’t be under the gun to “POST SOMETHING!” every week. I’ll be able to plan these out, and I also hope to avoid the sort of “quick review of something” that I sometimes ended up doing. With the newsletter, I’ll be publishing less frequently, but hopefully at a higher quality.
Secondly, I may also consider submitting to other E-zines and websites, which really hasn’t been an option in recent years.
Of course, just mentioning the newsletter leaves a lot of unanswered questions. What will it be about? How often will it publish? How can you subscribe? We’ll answer these questions next week and then after that, you can expect a whole lot less text on our front page.
