BIG changes at Legal and College Insurrections

BIG changes at Legal and College Insurrections

There have been two BIG changes that took place yesterday.

The first was the creation of the Quick Take section at Legal Insurrection, and the second was the consolidation of higher ed coverage at Legal Insurrection.

Quick Takes

You may recall that on December 12, 2015, I announced that we were creating a new section of Legal Insurrection, and invited readers to Help name our new section.

I love this video. Brilliant.

It’s also an excuse to tease out that we’re *likely* to have a new section of Legal Insurrection sometime early in the new year where we can do more spontaneous, shorter posts in addition to the full posts in the main column

There were a lot of great name suggestions. The consensus among authors was Legal Briefs. But I decided to stick with my original idea of Quick Takes.

So, you should see a gray box in the main column called …. Legal Insurrection Quick Takes. There also is a page on which all the Quick Takes are listed so you can scroll through anytime and see Quick Takes that have moved off the home page (there is a link in the Quick Take box to get you there, “Click to see more“).

We’ve always faced a dilemma — because we are a traditional blog format with a main column in which posts scroll down in reverse chronological order, if we fill up the main column with a lot of short posts, the more research or analytical posts we want to keep in front of readers leave the homepage too quickly. Several times a day I see events, often follow ups to things we’ve written about, or interesting videos, or other items that don’t warrant a full post. But there’s no place to put them. Same with “breaking” news that may not need a full post.

Now we have a place to put those items, in Quick Takes. If a Quick Take appears to develop into a story that needs to be expanded or updated, we can easily move it to the main column, or even feature it at the top of the website just below the banner, where we have four Featured Posts. Having a Quick Take section gives us tremendous flexibility.

Why did it take so long? I’ll take all the blame. The design and coding was ready early in the year, but because of multiple family health issues (which unfortunately are not over, contrary to what I thought), I didn’t have the mental energy or focus to roll out a new section sooner.

College Insurrection

College Insurrection’s coverage of higher education is being merged into Legal Insurrection. Started in August 2012, College Insurrection never developed an independent readership. Most of its traffic was referrals from Legal Insurrection — so the two websites had a single readership.

Having two websites with similar content (at least as respects higher ed) and a single readership didn’t seem to make sense after a while.

Our more in-depth coverage (what we’ve always done at Legal Insurrection) will remain in the main column at Legal Insurrection, but will be expanded with Aleister doing (almost) daily main posts about higher ed issues. We also will have shorter posts, the type that College Insurrection did, in the Quick Take section.

So, Legal Insurrection’s higher education coverage is expanding. The place to find everything is under the Tag “College Insurrection.” The College Insurrection homepage redirects to that tag, but all other pages are being kept alive so links to old posts don’t go bad. College Insurrection will not be updated anymore.

As important as the elections are (and they are), addressing the rot in higher ed is just as important over the long run. Politics is downstream from culture, as Andrew Breitbart said, and much of the culture is downstream from higher ed, in my view.

Change is Good

I think these two changes will be for the better. And will help keep us, ahem, stayin’ alive.

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