A little over a week ago, we took a significant change of direction at Sidepodcast, retiring the long serving and ever popular daily post. The effect of doing so was startling. Freed from the responsibilities of managing a community 24/7, Christine and I immediately found ourselves inspired to produce more and more content.

Although a big one, the decision to axe the daily post was unquestionably the correct choice, and on the back of that, we're introducing a number of minor tweaks to the way the site operates.

Above my pay grade

Two years ago, if you had asked us about the future of online journalism, we might have pointed you in the direction of the likes of TechCrunch - a group-edited technology blog, who's decentralised pool of writers operate independently, removed from traditional editorial processes. However, following a recent high profile public meltdown we're less certain that this bold new frontier is all it's cracked up to be.

To that end, we're shifting the publishing process from a model where writers take full responsibility for article publication and reinstating Christine as site editor with final content sign-off. Notably, we're not making these changes in response to any issue here - we have come to trust Sidepodcast's authors unconditionally. The change is simply bringing the site in line with our revised mindset.

For guest writers and columnists, this means Christine will give everything the once over before publication. For readers, it means there is a known level of consistency surrounding everything released on the site.

According to plan

It's worth also taking a minute to clarify something causing a bit of confusion since last week's changes.

We very much encourage threads and discussions on topics beyond Formula 1. During the past seven days we have commented on an American football game, a baseball game, a V8 race in Australia and an Apple keynote in Cupertino. You would be hard pressed to find a more diverse range of subjects for a single community to share in the space of a week and all of them were made possible thanks to people stepping up and owning a discussion.

We're not looking to kill off non-F1 talk at all, simply to reframe it such that it's more accessible and focussed than had previously been the case.

Changes may not always be to people's liking, but we do appreciate you all sticking with us for the ride. Any more questions, please let us know. Remember, we can't answer them if you don't ask them.