Housekeeping: June 2007 Archives

Dear Readers,

Welcome to Friendly Fire, the blog of the Daily News' opinion section.

As the title suggests, this will be a blog of contrasting viewpoints and likely disagreements, but in, we hope, a fraternal spirit. This is how things work here in the DN op/ed department, where we disagree with each other on a good many things, but still manage to get along quite well. (To gauge the extent of our philosophical discord, just witness the intellectual diversity of our communal blogroll!)

The political marketplace (especially on the net) seems to lack much in the way of collegiality, so hopefully this blog will meet a great latent demand.

The contents of Friendly Fire will be as varied as the cast putting it together. To be sure, there will be plenty about the Valley, L.A., and politics, but we don't see ourselves as limited to these subjects. This is an exchange based on all that strikes our fancy. Even things like this:

With a far-flung -- and expanding -- group of contributors, there should always be plenty of worthwhile material here. You can help that along by registering and commenting. We're counting on your comments to enliven this blog, and we're hopeful that some of the material here will be able to find its way back into the print edition, creating the sort of net-print synergy that is the Holy Grail of the journalism industry these days.

So welcome, and expect some changes. We decided it was more important to get this blog up and running than to get it perfect first. Our format will change, as will our contributors, and the content -- well, that will always be evolving. Stick with us. This should be fun.

Best,
Chris Weinkopf
Editorial Page Editor, L.A. Daily News