Today, we announce “The Blog” for Cigar Coop. It’s a new feature that will replace the Editor’s Corner feature which is being sunset.

Hold your horses, isn’t Cigar Coop already a blog?

If you go back ten years ago, anyone who wrote something online who didn’t have a print media component was called a blogger and their medium was called a blog. I never liked the word and always found it to be limiting. My main complaint has been a “blog” is one component of what we do. Today, I’m happy to say that when you go to IPCPR/PCA Trade Show, you hear the words “Collective Cigar Media”  and not “bloggers” referring to those who don’t do a print component.

I don’t believe all written word online translates to being a blog. Blogs tend to have two characteristics – they are written more from a personal perspective and then tend to operate in an agile-way – in other words, they operate loosely and without structure. There is nothing wrong with that, it just isn’t what we do with the majority of our content. For the most part, Cigar Coop strives to make its content less personal and employs a great deal of structure. Our news goes through a validation process. Our review process is also quite structured – and we leverage a proofreading process for all of our content.

However, there is content on Cigar Coop that is personal and agile that we have been doing over time. One can argue the crappy content from 2010 fell into that category.  In recent years, our “Editor’s Corner” segments fit the bill. Over the past several years, “Editor’s Corner” has served as an editorial sandbox and a place to describe some of the behind the scenes inner workings at Cigar Coop. For the most part, Editor’s Corner would publish a the beginning of each month. When it came to editorial content, the emergence of our “Feature Stories” has started to overlap Editor’s Corner.

What I have decided to do is to classify all editorial content as a “Feature Story” and focus the inner-workings/behind-the-scenes content of Cigar Coop as “The Blog”. These also will no longer be scheduled for the first of the month, but will publish as needed.

For years I also resisted the name blog also because I feel in a print-media-first industry such as the cigar industry, it impeded online media from being competitive. Now doing Cigar Coop for almost a decade, I realize the industry will always be print-media-first, therefore if one component of what Cigar Coop has is a blog, then it should be called a blog.

All previous Editor’s Corner content can now be found under “The Blog” – available on the Cigar Coop menu or at https://www.cigar-coop.com/category/blog. We’ll still classify everything else as “non-blog” but ultimately we will leave that up to our audience as what you think of it.

We’ll expand this content to also provide an avenue to do “third party” content from our strategic partners. We will never use this to have “guest bloggers” for the sake of having unknown non-industry guest bloggers. Instead from time to time, if one of our partners has built content aligning with our vision, we will use “The Blog” to share it.

We look forward to this next step in the evolution of Cigar Coop.