Dear reader

I just wanted to provide you with an update about the future direction of Width of a Post.

We are going to be taking a step back in our coverage of Bradford City, at least for around the next 15 months. At that point (the eve of the 2016/17 season), we will review our resources and will hopefully be in a position to return to the level of writing we have delivered for the past three-and-a-half seasons.

In the meantime we are not going away by any means, but the site will be updated a lot less frequently.

Why is WOAP taking a step back?

It’s mainly about me (Jason). Although WOAP is still relatively youthful in how old it is; for the long-term perspective of wanting to keep it going for years and years to come, I need to take a breather from the role of editor.

Before I set up WOAP in December 2011, I had spent eight years writing and subsequently co-managing Boyfrombrazil.co.uk. My first article for BfB was a clumsy piece criticising Nicky Law in October 2003. For almost 12 years now I have written continually about the club, and there are few players or events over that time that I’ve not shared my views about.

And it has been fantastic and I love doing it: but writing about City, combined with the role of managing this site, has become hugely time-consuming and draining.

For so many years I’ve given up Saturday nights, meeting up with friends and family – even a promising career on Football Manager(!) – to write match reports and the like. I’m not looking for sympathy, it has always been my choice. But it has come to a point where I want to take a break from it. Maybe on a Saturday night I can finally watch this X-Factor show I’ve been hearing so much about…

At times over 2014/15, I really didn’t enjoy doing WOAP. It became a hindrance, a pain in the backside. Yet I’m so proud of this site and its popularity with City supporters. Of the respect it holds amongst a lot of people. I don’t want to get to the point where the quality drops because I fall out of love doing it. Unless that idealistic career in football journalism comes about (when are you retiring by the way, Mr Parker?) I can see myself writing about City, for WOAP, for decades.

But right now, I want to take the pressure away that I feel at games, when instead of getting lost in the match I’m fretting over the introduction for the report. As a dad of a two-year-old, I want to enjoy spending time with my daughter without rushing her to bed so I can get out the laptop.

My day job is going really well, but more time is demanded of me, and I want to focus on that. I also want to have a go at a couple of other writing projects (more on that at some point in the not-to-distant-future).

So how will WOAP work for the next 15 months?

In the three-and-half-years of WOAP, we have published over 1,100 articles. In a typical week we produce four to five articles. Match reports, match previews, opinion pieces, interviews.

We are going to cut back on this. The WOAP team will continue to write on Bradford City matters, but we are going for quality over quantity.

We will write and publish when we have something we want to say, rather than feeling we need to say something about everything. We will continue to do match reports, but not on every game and not always turned around as quickly. The big matches will be covered of course. But an uninspiring draw at home to a relegation-threatened team, playing all out defence, might come and go without WOAP comment. We’ve written about such games to death.

Originally we were going to take the full summer off and return in pre-season. The club’s takeover situation means we will keep the lines of communication open, so we can comment on the future of Bradford City. We also have a couple of other things up our sleeve, which we hope you will enjoy.

Going forward we won’t be writing four or five times a week. We won’t even write something every week. But we will hopefully still produce articles that you enjoy reading.

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I say all of this with a heavy heart.

I don’t want to sound egotistical, but we are fortunate to receive so much positive feedback and many readers tell us how much they rely on WOAP as part of the way they follow Bradford City. I feel like I am letting these people down. I am very sorry.

I’m also disappointed that taking a step back means we will inevitably lose some of our audience. We have increased daily readership from a few hundred in the early days to around 1,500 in 2013, and now to around 5,000-6,000 this year.

Part of this is due to our subscribers, as over 3,500 readers have signed up to receive email notifications of every article we publish. If you want to make sure you don’t miss on our less frequent updates, you might want to sign up too. You’ll find details on the right hand menu of this site.

As ever, thanks so much for your support. It means the world to have other people enjoy something that you do.

Jason McKeown

Categories: News

Tags: BCAFC, Width of a Post