WELCOME TO THE CATCH 2.0

Time will tell if this is a suitable replacement for the newsletter edited by Baxter Walsh, but as your new (and somewhat delinquent) Catch editor I would like to see if this restores, democratizes -- and maybe even spices up -- communication at the New Haven Rowing Club. For those of you unused to blogs, and suspicious about why this might be a good idea, let me explain.

A blog is an online communication device that is much like an interactive magazine. The editor (me, Claire Potter) can post articles, information and announcements at any time of the day or night, and you can respond to them through the "comments" function. People use blogs for many reasons, organizational, egotistical, literary, and communitarian. The women's sweep squad at NHRC has been using a blog for over a year to keep itself organized, posting practice schedules, line-ups, recipes, and information about upcoming regattas. If this blog really works, we at the Catch might even be able to reduce the amount of spam coming into your email by making announcements available on-line several times a week. Theoretically, anyone who has the passwords can post. This means that in the event of a vacation, someone else can take over the Catch; or club offficers and regatta chairs could simply post their own materials; or someone could volunteer to help me do this (really...I'm not using the phone. Just call.)

OK. For right now, it seems to be a good idea anyway to have one person coordinating the blog, but that does not always have to be the case.

Furthermore, we can publish all the stuff we used to publish (and given that the Catch got away from me for a while, I have quite the backlog), all of it in a more timely manner. Just make a Bookmark for your browser (now is a good time) and check it as you check other websites that you frequent so that you can keep up with club business. Board minutes can go up the day after the meeting; people can get up at 5:00 A.M. on the day of the DSS to remind themselves exactly where they need to be; and if you find something funny that should go up, send it on, and we'll post it (if it is in moderately good taste, that is.) Just send it to us by clicking on the e-mail link in the profile, and we'll either put it up right away or be in touch about why not.

What is the down side of the blog? Well, it's a change. And club members used to the Catch might not like it. Two other things come to mind:

1. Just like e-mail, I've noticed that folks in the blogosphere can go off the deep end when posting comments. We are great proponents of free speech here at the Catch, but right now, until we all get used to this format, all postings should go through the editors. So the comment function is turned off.

2. Because you aren't getting it as an email attachment, you need to train yourself to click on the Bookmark every day or so and look -- that is, if you want to stay up to date. At least for a little while, when something particularly crucial is posted, we'll send around an email reminding you to check.

But we hope you will want to read it: please see the links to the right, and let us know if there are others you want added. If this blog succeeds, it will really become Rowing Central for everything you want and need to know, both about our little club and about the rowing world in general.

So once again, Welcome to the Catch 2.0!