Six Months of Communal Narcissism

Just over six months ago, we launched Chattarati with a few simple goals in mind:

Chattarati will strive to bring a unique perspective to everything from breaking news to local politics and economics to events and the arts. We’re also intent on creating conversations and community.

Looking back through our nearly 300 posts and the almost 1000 comments they generated, it’s safe to say we’ve hit the mark in many ways. We’ve certainly come farther than I imagined possible when dreaming up Chattarati last spring. But for each thing we’ve gotten right, there’s an opportunity for us to improve over the next weeks, months and —dare I say it?— years to come.

Conversation and Community
We started with conversation —interacting with friends on Twitter and Facebook before the site even launched— and have continued on that path with our CQ feature and “real world” events like ChattUp. We’ve learned a great deal from those of you interested enough to comment on a blog post, reply on Twitter, or send an email with your thoughts. Still, we can do a better job of engaging with the sea of Chattanooga bloggers and helping the most compelling voices rise to the top. We’d love to hear from you on ways to make this happen.

Unique Perspectives on the News
We never expected to enter the “breaking news” business. After all, we are a bunch of 9-to-5ers who pull this off in what spare time we can carve out on a day-to-day basis. We saw our job as one of curating the news—promoting the stories we found interesting or deserving of more attention—and providing editorial commentary on the topics of the day. There’s a lot of noise out there, even in the category of “local news”, and this combination of news filtering with commentary has been one of our strengths. The way news content is created and consumed is always changing, but never more quickly than now. We have a lot of ideas, and we welcome yours.

Our next big opportunity to influence the conversation in Chattanooga is the 2009 municipal election season. We have some pretty exciting things in store, but they’re not quite ready for prime time. Stay tuned.

This Post is Satire
As promised, we never took Chattanooga too seriously. Chad Newton poked at everyone from the local media to big business to elected officials and Chattanooga’s finest. And how could we forget Fake Ron, the world’s first Twittering fake mayor? We’ve had more fun with these satirical posts than with just about anything else. In fact, at one point we considered making Chattarati an all-satire blog. Though that never felt quite right, we’re committed to finding the funny (and making a point or two) with satire in 2009.

By the Numbers
In the spirit of transparency, here are a few stats we’ve collected over the past six months.

• 286 posts
• 987 comments
• 28,128 visits
• 11,563 unique visitors
• 66,808 page views
• 545 photos in our Flickr pool
• 324 followers on Twitter
• 198 members in our Facebook group

Where Do We Go From Here?
Just as we never could have predicted everything that happened since our launch in July, there’s no telling exactly what the future holds for Chattarati. One thing I’m sure of is that our insanely creative and talented crew is going to continue to do great things and hopefully make an impact on our city. As I said when we launched, we hope you’ll join us.

Two Final Words
Thank you.