Thanks, given.
The day after Rachel Maddow and her producer Laura Conaway made a video of themselves making and enjoying our new drink, the “Emergency Manager”, our blog got a mention on The Rachel Maddow Show itself. Last night, Rachel ran through a rather impressive of list of things that she is thankful for, things we should ALL be thankful for. Eclectablog was one of them.
We’re mentioned at around the 5:20 mark but the entire segment is worth your time today:
I’m thankful for reported local politics blogs, some of which are partisan and some of which aren’t. Sites like Eclectablog in Michigan and Plunderbund and Ohio Capital Blog in Ohio for reporting out and documenting local political stories in a way that we really need nationally but can sometimes no longer get from the local, more official press, since the business model has cost so many reporters their jobs.
It pretty much goes without saying how thankful I am for Rachel Maddow and her amazing team of producers and regular contributors. I’ve been listening to Rachel since the days she was on Air America and a piece I wrote about her on Daily Kos is still my most popular diary there. She is the smartest pundit on television and there’s a reason she’s making inroads on the market share formerly dominated by Fox News.
I’m thankful for Rachel Maddow’s brilliance and her ability to cut to the core of complex issues, helping us to frame them and get our minds around them so that we can talk about them more intelligently. That’s exactly what I’m trying to accomplish here at Eclectablog and The Rachel Maddow Show is a model for that in many ways.
Finally, I’d like to thank all of YOU, our readers. We have a very solid core of regular visitors to Eclectablog. Many of you I know personally, others I know only virtually and most I don’t know at all. I am so thankful to being doing something that I love and that is appreciated by so many. Last month we had well over a half-million pageviews. In January of this year, it was just 55,000. With nearly 3,000,000 pageviews for the year so far, you can see that Eclectablog has enjoyed explosive growth in popularity and that’s primarily because our regular readers share our stuff on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and through other social media.
We wouldn’t be where we are today with you (and Rachel Maddow’s occasional plugs have helped, too : ) so on this Thanksgiving Day, allow me to say, with the greatest respect and appreciation:
