Behind The Nihon Review

It’s on again. The Nihon Review is again experimenting with blogs. While I’m not quite willing to say our first entry into the blogosphere was a total failure, there were a number of problems with our first attempt. But I’m hoping a change of strategy will address that. I think it’s fairly obvious to anyone that actually did follow any of our blogs (what was there, like three of you) that we all had different strengths and weaknesses. That’s hardly saying that any of our writers are bad writers… I certainly don’t think that, and I’d be surprised if anyone does. What I do think, though, is that our best work is done as a team, as seen from quality of our work on the main site. This is why I came to the conclusion that the best move to make on the blog experiment would be a multi-author blog, in which authors could contribute whenever they pleased. I think it would keep the work from becoming monotonous and I speculate that each of our individual writing styles play to each others strengths and weaknesses. That’s the hope anyway.

For anyone who did actually bother to read our old blogs, you’ll have a fair idea of what to expect from this one. The focus will be commentary and editorials on anime and Japanese culture that our outside the realm of the reviews we generally put on the front page, as well as an opportunity for me to… well… rant about various aspects of the main site (like our crappy staff members… j/k). But, more importantly, this blog will hopefully give our readers an insight into the thought processes of a few of our staff that aren’t totally obvious from just reading our reviews. As far as the blog is concerned, I can’t make promises, but I hope you can expect a site that will be updated more frequently than the main one (and obviously more frequently than the old individual blogs), and I’m sure that you can expect some interesting writing on topical issues that will spark discussion.

Admittedly, though, we are probably going to be fairly laissez faire about the whole thing, so we can’t really make any specific promises (hell, I still don’t know exactly which of our staff members are going to be involved in this project). We will try our best to write stuff which is interesting and informative, though. At the end of the day, we hope that you enjoy what we write and find yourself coming back for more. That’s the most important thing, I guess.