Six months after ccpopculture began, I hit my two hundredth post and commemorated the “event” by making a few changes to the site. I changed the name (from Carbon Copy to ccpopculture), and introduced both Extended Cut and Double Feature as alternative posts – up until that point, every single one of my posts had been precisely two hundred words.

It’s taken me a while longer than six months to publish another two hundred posts, and this one right here is the four hundredth I’ve written. It also finds me at the beginning of a new year, right around the time you look to the future, right about the time you set goals and make resolutions.

I’m not big on New Years resolutions, but this does present a good opportunity to think about the direction ccpopculture is taking. Over the last two hundred posts, the site has shifted direction a little – I’ve written a couple essays (under Commentary), the longer form posts has meant I’ve updated less regularly (certainly not more than once a day, as was my average in the first six months!) and the focus of ccpopculture has shifted gradually toward film.

I would expect these trends to continue; a lot of the motivation for my early writing was to drive page views, and that’s not something that drives me anymore. I found the best way to encourage traffic was to post regularly and, particularly, to post about television shows shortly after they aired. My writing about music and book has naturally decreased – the former because I really need music to inspire me to want to write about it, the latter because I haven’t been reading enough novels – but I’ve made an effort to continue to write regularly about television, often committing to writing about two or three shows a week, every week.

Here’s the thing: I don’t like a lot of my television writing. When I have a full time job and I’m trying to get posts published as quickly as possible after a show airs, it’s hard to produce an end result I’m happy with. I’m happy with some of my television writing, on shows like Girls and Game of Thrones, but if I’m being honest, my writing about Underbelly: Squizzy and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. hasn’t produced much of merit. Page views, sure … good writing, not so much.

I’m not quite ready to throw off the other media to become a purely film website. I like writing about music, literature, and television. But not worrying about page views means that I’m not going to stress about covering two or three shows a week, and I’m not going to stress about getting my television articles done within an hour if I don’t have anything substantial to say. If I had to make any ccpopculure resolutions for 2014 here, they’d be these:

• Don’t commit to writing about more than one television show a week, at least not regularly.
• Consider less time sensitive ways of writing about television; don’t just publish posts for the sake of publishing them.

Because I still want to write about television, I’m considering experimenting with forms other than the old fashioned episode-by-episode recap model. While I’ll probably work with that for television shows that warrant it, I’m considering some other approaches for shows that don’t reward that model. I doubt these approaches will muster the same number of page views but – hopefully – they’ll lead to better writing.