Qntra
Daily article production continued. Mircea Popescu issued a wake up call on the need to grow the active Qntra authorship pool beyond myself and improve circulation. To this end I have one month to make a material improvements on these fronts after which the situation will up for re-evaluation again. Recent budgeting math is telling me I can afford to give Qntra some years of full time commitment barring an unlikely persistent and severe downswing in the BTC/USD in the absence of upwards price movement, so my focus this month is going to be using this freedom to excercise applying my time more effectively to build Qntra on a full time basis.
The problem to be attacked is that since Qntra went offline in 2017, it fell from being the credible Grey Lady of the space to getting stuck in a very Pizarro-esque stasis where it can be mistaken as "my other blog". Kicking Qntra out of this defensive stasis requires attacking along two lines:
- Rebuilding Contributor Interest
- Shoving Qntra In People's Newsholes
For my sins on inaction in allowing Qntra to stagnate, I will be putting some of my own skin in the game as a backstop to make sure new and returning contributors can get paid. Shortly after the conversation with Mircea Popescu concluded, shinohai expressed interest in getting back into writing regularly. Further conversation with shinohai will resume Monday. While far from being "mission accomplished" it is a start.
I suspect the most productive line of outreach, for finding both writers and readers, is going to be commenting on blogs. This means seeing who is writing about what Qntra's covered and starting conversations. I don't know how many people I'm going to find blogging in 2020 outside the Republic, but to the extent independent bloggers outside the Republic might still be a thing, it is a more promising space than platform herds. The idea is, that as more people are identified in the wild, more places to shove news into newsholes will be found.
Tomorrow I'll also hammer together a simple "How To Contribute To Qntra" article out of the present scattered materials to have a single place to point prospects for onboarding into the WoT generally and Qntra specifically.
Other Notables
Mike_c offered a signed payment address.
Per the conversation about Qntra with Mircea Popescu, future weekly reviews will include day by day recaps in pushing myself towards increasing organization.
Isn't there some journalism/other local uni in Montevideo, maybe worth getting to talk to students and see who you can filter as your help or something?
There are some Faculties of Communiction I'll try to recon. The University system here is a bit odd compared to what I'm used to. Back in old country Communication was a sort of "default" major that consistently gathered the bulk of any given class. Here the big student catcher is the law school which enrolls a full quarter of Udelar's students. A full quarter of the University "educated" class here is doomed to fight in this small market for lawyers, notaries, or translators.
Presently the local Universities are in their summer recess, but as classes start to spin up I'll try to do some recon.