This Is How Important Articles About The Maritime Industry Are Researched And Written
gCaptain is not the single news webpage, it’s a network of information that includes several social media accounts, a video studio, a job board, incoming email accounts, outgoing email newsletters, information for advertisers, a store, corporate and sponsored news, ways to submit news links, and several other mechanisms to receive, process, and disseminate information.
The majority of feedback for yesterday’s article came via social media and email. Those readers younger than myself (43) overwhelmingly contact me via social email, those older prefer email. Neither is a good way to contact us.
Out of all the ways to interact with gCaptain the most time consuming, aggravating, and costly for us to maintain is our forum. It’s also the place we receive the most criticism because it contains heated debate that does not fit neatly into a modern world that strives to be “nice” and certainly not into a social media world that promotes civility by separating opposing voices into clusters of people who echo each other’s opinions.
While our forum does have a stellar staff of volunteer moderators and strong rules against personal attacks and bad behavior… it still manages to be a source of hurt feelings. I can not tell you how many people over the years have written to tell me they are quitting the forum because they are tired of being “attacked” by opposing views or tired of reading numerous posts from certain individuals who hold particularly passionate views about certain topics.
Even more troubling is the fact that non-Americans seem especially put off by the loud, overbearing, and too often dismissive American voices that tend to dominate the threads. This is troubling because the value of the forum increases in correlation with the diversity of it’s members.
It’s true. Our forum is a major pain in the ass. And that pain is especially acute for me as CEO of gCaptain. It’s also expensive to maintain and participation numbers continue to decline as readers flock to our social media channels.
But I keep paying our forum server and maintenance bills anyway. I do so because it’s powerful.
In the last decade, no less than 5 major books have been written by journalists who were inspired by our forum. Countless academic papers, working groups, and even Congress continue to cite it. Major expose articles from media powerhouses like the New York Times have been written about it and this year THE Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists started their pieces on our forum.
“Thanks, man!” said 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist T. Christian Miller in a recent text to me “We could not have done without your help.”
Overwhelmingly our older readers prefer to provide information for investigative articles and feedback via email and a smaller percentage send me private messages (PMs) via LinkedIn.
This information is critical to our ability to get the information we need to investigate important new stories but it requires a lot of work on our part. Everything submitted to gCaptain via email and private messages require us to assign journalists and fact-checkers to investigate further. Conversely, when it’s posted to the forum our readers have the opportunity to do the initial groundwork for us.
An even bigger problem with email is the fact we get lots of great stories and information we don’t have the resources to follow-up on. If someone sends me an email or PM and, because of the constraints of time, I can’t respond or followup then that information is lost forever. However, if that same information had been posted to our forum then it would be part of the public record and available to researchers forever.
Despite well-documented problems (which come with significant consequences) social media is better than email. Anyone can share our articles and tag me with comments. It’s super-efficient and easy. And unlike private emails, social media algorithms make sure that larger groups of people who are interested in your information see it.
Social media is especially great for organizing grassroots efforts and to corral groups of like-minded people to support a certain problem.
The problem with social media, however, is because your personal information is highly valuable to the social network, they use various techniques to hide and lock up your information which makes it exceedingly difficult for serious researchers and journalists to access.
Because there is no registration process to view gCaptain forum threads, it is archived and “spidered” by commercial (e.g. google), journalist, and academic search engines.
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