# A modest proposal for the Straight Dope **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [June 11, 2021, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-modest-proposal-for-the-straight-dope/944055 "2021-06-11T15:48:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 164
**Author:** ![Cecil\_Adams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ad7895/32.png) [@Cecil\_Adams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cecil_Adams)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2021, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-modest-proposal-for-the-straight-dope/944055/164 "2021-06-13T22:11:30Z")
> [@mordecaiB](#): > > I think this idea is totally backwards. Instead of having the SDMB make enough money to cover Ed’s salary and expenses, why doesn’t Ed’s column bring in enough money to support itself, and have the additional benefit of drawing new readers to the board that are likely to sign up. If the Cecil Adams name is the big draw he seems to thinks he is, let him prove it on his own, not at the expense of us on the board. As I said above, posters are more than willing to pony up cash for the Dope, they’ve been begging for years to be able to donate. Just give us a dollar amount you think you need to keep the SDMB running each year, I have no doubt that it will be reached. Let Ed raise money on his own for his column. It’s my column, not Ed’s, thank you very much. I assure you neither of us has any expectation of making a lot of money doing this. It’s more the prospect of having something to which we’d devoted a good chunk of our lives simply sputter out. That’s where things are headed as things stand now. Reviving the column is an attempt to stave off the end. Whether it’ll work I don’t know. But if we do nothing it’s inevitable. It’s not simply a question of money. We need to bring in new people. The community is aging out. The column was what brought people to the board in the first place. The online Straight Dope community formed almost immediately after the column archive went live on America Online in the mid-1990s. The early members of the SDMB were fans of the column. Either they knew it from their local alternative weekly, they’d read a Straight Dope book, or they saw a column featured on the AOL home page. Fighting ignorance was always the mission for both the column and the board. Once the Straight Dope migrated from AOL to the Internet, the SDMB took on a life of its own. After a while it generated its own search traffic and more than paid its own way. That’s no longer the case and hasn’t been for a while. The reasons for that are complicated. The ad delivery model changed faster than we could keep up with. Google kept tweaking the search algorithm. (Seriously, after one new iteration loaded, our numbers dropped 40% overnight.) To an extent, I suppose, the world simply moved on to shinier toys. Reviving the column is an attempt to keep the enterprise afloat. It may not work. If it doesn’t, we move on to plan B, which (most likely) is that I return to retirement, management appoints an admin with tech skills, and the board survives as long as it can. I can see there are some who’d prefer to skip to plan B to start with. Patience. I’ve proposed to management that we conduct a three-month trial. During that time we’d need to achieve three defined objectives. The first is that we’d need sign up X number of subscribers at Y dollars by Z date (or anyway we’d need to raise X times Y amount). The second is that Little Ed and I would have to be able to get the column out each week without assistance. The third is that the envisioned collaboration with the Membership - I’m trying that on for size - would actually have to work. Item #3 is the one I worry about. I’ll say it again: finding questions worthy of the Straight Dope treatment is by far the hardest part of the job. **Czarcasm** upthread has the right idea: there needs to be an opportunity to tell a story memorably explaining how the world works. Find such an opportunity and the column writes itself. No doubt everyone will have their own opinions about what constitutes a good story. They won’t necessarily coincide with mine. The long-term plan is that topics I take a pass on could be written up by others as staff reports. But that’s down the road. We may not get that far. Management may not let me try this little experiment at all. We’ll just have to see. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-modest-proposal-for-the-straight-dope/944055)._