Our New Year’s Resolutions

New Year’s Resolutions: We all make them. Most get broken before the first week. Some survive. Others get modified.

Here at Capitol Hill Blue, we’ve made some New Year’s Resolutions of our own. It will be up to you – the readers – to tell us if we keep them. We plan to honor them. If we slip, we’re sure you will tell us when we do.

Our resolutions for 2008:

We will get back to basics: In recent years we’ve become complacent, too willing to depend on others to do our jobs for us, too willing to use wire service news copy or to employ those who took too many shortcuts or the easy way out.

No more. Beginning today, the wire service stories are gone. We’re not Yahoo News or The Huffington Post. We’re Capitol Hill Blue and we used to be known as a web site that developed our own stories and went behind the news to tell our readers what was really happening in Washington and the political scene.

A couple of screwups on our end made us timid, reluctant to pursue stories and unsure of our sources. Not now. We stopped trusting our own instincts when those same instincts got us where we are today. That was a mistake.

So we’re back to digging and digging hard. Unnamed sources? Yes, we will use them when necessary. In today’s vengeful political environment going public can be hazardous to your career is not your health. If people can feed us information that will expose wrongdoing in our government, we will use that information and protect their identities. We will do our best to verify that information before publication but we will run with stories and we will not judge our success by what others do. Our only criteria will be the trust of you, our readers.

Fewer ads: As with most web sites, the number of ads on our pages has increased. We’ve cut back on the number of ads on our home page. We still need the ads but, with luck, there will be fewer of them.

More reader polls: We’re interested in what you think and we’re restoring the reader polls that used to be an integral part of this web site. Not sure why they stopped but they are back, starting today.

More reader feedback: Capitol Hill Blue offers more venues for reader feedback than most news web sites, both in direct comment to our stories and in our popular discussion board: Reader Rant. In 2008, we will explore other opportunities to allow our readers to become a more active part of our news coverage.

More interaction with readers: As founder, publisher and editor of Capitol Hill Blue, I pledge to keep an open dialog with readers through email, the comments sections of our stories and on ReaderRant. I’m encouraging our columnists to do the same.

That’s it: Five resolutions which we hope will make this a better web site; five benchmarks that readers can use for the next 12 months to tell us if we have, nor have not, kept our promises; five ways to succeed…or fail.

We’re on the record…it’s up to you to keep us honest.