Welcome to Wheat & Tares! Today is our first day; we’re the newest Mormon blog, and we want to give you a warm welcome. We hope you’ll stick around for a long time.
It’s been quite a week. All of the writers here are used to writing about issues that affect and interest you, our readers. We’re not used to being the subject, and frankly, we’re a bit uncomfortable to be the focus of—dare I say it—a scandal. But it feels like there’s an elephant in the room, so we’d like to address it and put it behind us: Out with the Old, In with the New.
We have nine bloggers here: myself (Mormon Heretic), Bored in Vernal, Hawkgrrrl, Stephen Marsh, Jeff Spector, FireTag, Adam F, Andrew S, and jmb275. You may know that we all used to blog at Mormon Matters. As the result of an incident that occurred last week, the 9 of us have decided to create this blog.
John Dehlin gave his side of the story on Tuesday. We have great admiration for John, and we’re all grateful that John started Mormon Matters and gave us all a voice. We hope that Mormon Matters will continue to be a success. We love and support our co-bloggers Joanna and Natasha who have decided to remain at Mormon Matters to help out. John has plans to revamp the blog, and we wish him well.
John wasn’t involved in the day to day operations of Mormon Matters—we were. From time to time he would pop in a post unannounced on a timely, usually controversial topic. John’s Marlin Jensen post on Sept 25 was no different. Day to day, we’ve tried to give everyone who comes to the site a voice. Censoring and closing down comments was a rare tactic under our team at Mormon Matters, and it will be equally rare here at Wheat and Tares. If you can use mostly clean language and are respectful of others, you are welcome here. We don’t care if you like what we write or not; your comments can stand or fall on their own merits. Mormon Matters was known for the passion of our commenters, and we don’t plan to change that at all. Just keep it clean and civil.
While John was aware of our team’s policies, as the owner, he did not feel obligated to them. His Jensen post turned out to be controversial. Due to time constraints, and fearing the conversation would become unruly, he chose to close down the comments—a relatively routine practice at other blogs. But it was not routine at our blog.
We questioned John about the wisdom of shutting down comments, especially since John wanted to bump the post back to the top of the blog because the Huffington Post had linked to his article. Because some had questioned John’s actions, he feared that someone with admin rights might open the comments without his permission. John was incredibly busy last week, and he didn’t have time to deal with us or monitor the post. So he revoked everyone’s rights to the blog without any notice to us. All of us were absolutely stunned, and that’s not the way we felt we should be treated after working hard to more than double the readership and improve the blog’s already high readership ranking dramatically.
John has wanted to move Mormon Matters in a different direction for quite some time, a direction that wasn’t suitable to the existing admins and would have required a lot of effort and commitment. While John is great with podcasts and multimedia, many of our team prefer straight blogging. While the misunderstanding was the unfortunate catalyst, it just made sense for both him and us to part ways. None of us are happy with how things happened. Yes, there were hurt feelings on all sides, but we are confident the healing has already begun.
Regarding “the scandal” from last week, I think most of us would like to adopt Forrest Gump’s line and say, “That’s all I have to say about that.” It’s something that we won’t forget, but we are confident that this new blog is the start of something really cool. Out with the Old, In with the New.
I’m sure there will be passionate debates here, just as there were at Mormon Matters, and we welcome that. We want to encourage openness and dialogue about topics that they may not have anywhere else, plus new content that is not confined to Mormonism. We think what we created at Mormon Matters was cool, and we want to bring the cool things there over here. Out with the Old, In with the New. We hope that we are instantly familiar to you, and hope you’ll stick around for the good times we’ll have here.
Once again, welcome, and we hope that Wheat and Tares will be one of your favorite blogs! (Actually, we hope it will be your favorite!) We’re truly grateful you joined us here. To us, you are the community.
I have to say the main reason I RSSed this blog was because FireTag (my favorite blogger) jumped ship over here too. Of course, I appreciate all of your posts!
Here’s to many new and wonderful postings! I’m looking forward to reading them!
As for all the controversy, it’s interesting to read about but I don’t much understand all the infighting and don’t care enough to try and understand. So it will be nice that I won’t have to hear about it any more!
Its great to see you guys here. Good luck with getting things running.
Welcome ‘Wheats’! So glad the bloggers from MM have stuck together to create something beautiful here! 🙂
sheesh, another blog to add to the RSS feed…
I wish you guys all the best here.
I am also incredibly interested in FireTag’s posts and can’t wait to see what he (and the rest of you) come up with.
I’m really glad to see you regroup and give your thoughts and energy a rebirth. Go Wheat and Tares!
I’m happy to see you all back in business!
Hi and Welcome!
And {{BIG Hugs}} all around, to everyone involved. Very excited to see what you guys will be doing here.
Oh.. and SOO excited that you guys are on twitter!
As one of The Exponent‘s twitter peeps, that’s probably where I’ll end up interacting with you guys the most. I hope you guys keep tweeting your stuff; I’ll be sure to RT you and dish out internet love there. 🙂
Thanks to all for the well wishing! Just a quick shout out to remember to continue to support Joanna and Natasha who remain behind at Mormon Matters. And also to visit another new blog today, Doves & Serpents.
Wahoo! Congrats y’all.
Well, I’m kinda glad I missed all the drama. I don’t like drama in my old age any more. It’s a lovely blog and I wish you all the best of luck!
5 Columns? Poor design choice. Way too busy and the summaries are too brief.
Is there a link to Dove’s and Serpents?
It’s great to see you up and running!
kari, thanks for the feedback on the site design. we wanted to get something up quickly and I think we’re all open to changing things. there could be some design changes still coming. (for example, we are going to add a plug so it is easier to read on mobile phones.)
I am glad to see so many have found us already. it is great to see and hear from all of you.
Actually, mh, I installed that plugin, you should check it out. It’s really nice, I like it a lot!!
Yes, thanks Kari, for the critique. This is not really set in stone at all. Just wanted to get up and running ASAP.
There are about 3 or 4 suggestions that I have. but I think I’ll wait to see if the ladies dictate them before I offer them as suggestions. 🙂
jmb, I just checked it out on my phone but it still seems graphics heavy with formatting problems.
On my phone (palm pre), it seems formatted well. very iPhone-ish.
Who are these ladies of which you speak?
On my phone (Blackberry Bold) it looks slick, IMO. But there’s a white space to the left – I have to scootch over to see the content.
http://www.dovesandserpents.org
Thanks for asking, Kari. We’re up for some constructive criticism… 🙂
“The Divorce” has been tough on me, the split has been very amicable IMO.
Looks like “Dad” is going to splash the cash on MM (Ferrari), and “Mum” is on a crash diet and has got a new haircut.
I’ll spend as much time as I can with both parents.
I wish you guys luck I don’t think it will take too long before you get the type of traffic you need.
I used to be a permablogger at Mormon Matters as well. I stopped blogging because I didn’t feel comfortable there. My topics of interest included libertarian politics, preparedness, the last days, the future of Mormonism and Mormon culture, Old Testament prophecy, Glenn Beck watching. I wasn’t sensational–I would say my style was fairly academic. I am a sort of Cleon Skousen type of Mormon–for now. When I joined Mormon Matters (I was among the first), I was to provide a perspective from this sort of 20th Century fundamentalism. John was thrilled with it–there were no problems per se, I just didn’t feel like I belonged there. So the question is, would there be a place for me here?
I have a motorola q9c and the columns don’t look very good.
There are only two that I know of…..
I ‘member ya.
I think you would fit in.
Something I noticed about both Glenn Beck and the local Hispanic activists is that they both clean up the trash when they have rallies, the place is very clean afterward. The same can’t be said of many.
Jon:
Thanks for the shout out. I’m the old and slow guy who’s last to get my materials into the new format (my colleagues are using the term “ancient” about my equipment), but I’ll be up and running shortly.
Congratulations on getting up and running, and best wishes with the new venture!
(FWIW I agree with Kari. The columns design is way too busy and distracting. Very hard to follow for me at least.)
Glad to see you guys back in business, and up and running so quickly. This is a great team with some great bloggers. I hope you’re just as successful in your new real estate as you were in the old digs.
tough divorce but congratulations on the new birth, hope baby and mom are doing well.
A suggestion: its easier to read text on pure white background, and blue colors tend to go down better for side bars 🙂
I have not seen MrQ&A for awhile, it is good to see him back around these parts.
Actually, Kari, I find the “busy” appearance and the brief summaries quite helpful. Instead of having to scroll through a lengthy post which lacks interest, I can easily cherry-pick. I only wish Blogger would offer us a stock template with similar capabilities, although I use the Recent Posts widget to try to achieve a similar effect.
Thanks, John! It was a long weekend for all, but we’re glad to be back in the biz.
Hear, hear. Welcome back Mr. Q&A!
I also did like the place on the left where there were random links. None of them really had much to do with the site per se, but they were always good for a chuckle in the middle of the day (or night).
Mike S – still working on that one, but thanks for noticing!
I’m on a square flatscreen, and there are words down the right side of each picture in the middle three columns. It makes it look like half of the first sentence is missing of each post.
AJB – thanks for the feedback. I’m seeing that same thing too. There are some programming changes for column width we can play with. You should have seen what we were looking at Sunday! And here it is only 48 hours later. 🙂
John, glad you found us! Let me give you an open invitation to blog here any time you want. We’d love to have you, especially if that other blog doesn’t want to post your stuff…
Thanks for skimming (mostly skipping) the drama. Sorry for whatever happened but I’m another reader who is too old to want to spend time with it…. Looking forward to your blog.
I discovered MM well after it had been up and running and honestly didn’t know who John Dehlin was or what he had accomplished. So for a long while, I wasn’t even sure what to make of his pop-up posts. Finally, I’ve recently made use of an MP3 player and have been able to listen to some of the Mormon Stories Podcast, but that was never the connection that took me to MM.
I appreciate all those involved who put their energy into it regularly, and I miss some authors who have silently disappeared. I look forward to continued blogging from all of you.
So who IS the owner here? Is it a single owner or board ownership? (One King or multiple judges?)
Rigel – 9 of the 11 bloggers from MM have come here, and we will run it as we ran the site there, as a team. Technical ownership is a little more narrow but won’t be impactful to the community.
One comment regarding comments:
Threaded comments can be nice, but it does make it hard to see the most recent comments as the most recent comment may actually be attached to something at the top. The older way made it possible to just scroll down to the the last place you read, and just read the few things since then. It made it kind of nice to quickly scan to what was new.
Again, pros and cons to each way.
Hey congrats on the new site. Very cool! I was surprised to come back from a couple weeks away and find a lot of my fav bloggers MIA at MM. Glad John put up the link and happy to get my regualr fix from you folk again. Hope it all goes really well guys.
Good luck with the new venture guys. I just discovered ‘W & T’today. I’ve always enjoyed all your posts over at MM and I’m looking forward to reading more of your interesting and challenging stuff here.I think the site looks great…all the best for the future.
Welcome to our new digs, JackUK. We’re glad you found us and hope you’ll come see us often!
So glad to see you here, dmac!
Rigel, just wanted to say it’s good to see you here. You were a vital part of our conversations over at MM and I hope you’ll join in just as frequently here!