D  e  s  e  r  t   E  x  p  o  s  u  r  e        January 2008

Desert Exposure, Version 2008

Tooting the horn for a new DesertExposure.com with the new year.

The new year brings exciting news for Desert Exposure, but to see what we mean you'll have to boot up your computer. Beginning with the online edition of our January issue and rolling out over the next few months, we'll be introducing some innovative improvements in our DesertExposure.com Web site at www.desertexposure.com You might think of it as DesertExposure.com version 2.0.

We launched the online edition of Desert Exposure with the January 2005 issue — a lifetime ago, in the fast-changing world of the Web. Since then, it's been gratifying to hear from readers across the country who've paid virtual visits to Southwest New Mexico via our site, often in preparation for in-person trips (or moving here permanently). Readers in our own region have also told us how much they enjoy being able to read an issue online when they've missed the print edition, or to refer to an old article when they've recycled the paper copy. The ability to search past issues back to January 2005 has also eliminated that nagging "What issue was that in?" feeling. With three years' worth of Desert Exposures now online, we figure that we've posted something over a million words' worth of good reading to date.

Increasingly, too, we realize that more and more folks simply prefer to get their news, information and entertainment on a computer screen instead of in the form of ink on dead trees. Not to sound like old fogeys, but it does seem that youngsters out there — the next generation of Desert Exposure readers, we like to think — are more attuned to pixels than print. We think of our own daughter, fingers flying over the keyboard, pulling answers out of the Internet instead of turning to printed newspapers or magazines. Heck, it's not just "young-uns": We make a habit of checking the New York Times online every day (especially handy here in Silver City, where only the Sunday print edition can be delivered to our high-desert doorstep), and get email news alerts from the Times as well as the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

No wonder, then, that traffic to our Web site keeps growing as users keep clicking. In 2007 alone, the number of monthly unique visitors to DesertExposure.com nearly doubled, from about 5,800 the first couple months of the year to an average of 10,000 per month for October through December. (Note that we're talking about unduplicated visitors — not even counting return visits from regular online readers — and not about "hits," an often-bandied-about Web statistic that's pretty much meaningless. Every file, every piece of artwork on a page that gets transmitted to a user's computer counts as a "hit," so one view of one page might generate 40 hits.) Combined with the 27,000-some readers who regularly consume our print edition, that means we're closing in on 40,000 people who enjoy Desert Exposure each month in one form or the other.

But we're not resting on our virtual laurels — DesertExposure.com is evolving to keep up with the expanding needs of our audience. As 2008 unfolds, you'll be seeing a new, more information-packed home page at www.desertexposure.com updated throughout the month with tips, behind-the-scenes news and the latest area events. We've already completely updated the online versions of our gallery guide and Red or Green? dining guide; even in months when the printed restaurant listings get abbreviated, you can always find the complete, up-to-date listings with capsule reviews online. Next, look for improvements to the electronic version of our popular "40 Days and 40 Nights" events calendar, to make it more current and even easier to access.

We'll also be making our online articles easier to read. Since Desert Exposure tends to cover topics more in-depth than your typical daily newspaper, our stories can sometimes require a lot of scrolling. In DesertExposure.com version 2.0, long articles will be broken into more manageable pages, to give your mouse's scroll wheel a rest.

Perhaps the most important change — which you'll notice immediately at www.desertexposure.com — involves the folks who make Desert Exposure possible each month: our advertisers. In what's certainly a first in our coverage area and a breakthrough that frankly we've never seen before online, all of our display print advertisers will now also be represented in our Web edition. And, no, we're not charging extra to put an ad online as well as on paper — it's simply included as part of the deal when you buy an ad in Desert Exposure.

The only real difference between ad placement in our print and online editions is that we're taking advantage of the power of the electronic medium to randomly rotate ads throughout our entire site. So if you click on this column two different times online, you're likely to see two different sets of ads. Moreover, in a nifty bit of time travel, this month's ads will pop up when you view pages from back issues going back over the past three years. If you want information on a particular advertiser and don't happen upon the right randomly placed ad, you can also go straight to a new ad index, which will include links to advertisers' own sites or emails. Clicking on any ad will also take you directly to this handy index.

Did I already mention that we're not charging advertisers extra for placement online?

It's worth adding here that we're also not charging readers to view any part of our Web site, or to search our archives back to January 2005. Nor do you have to register or login or give us any personal information. The Las Cruces and Silver City Sun-News sites charge $2.95 to read a single archived article. A subscription to the Silver City Daily Press' electronic edition — necessary to see more than a couple of current stories — costs $104 a year. Access to the online edition of the Albuquerque Journal costs $80 a year if you're not a print subscriber. Of course, daily newspapers have overhead and expenses that Desert Exposure isn't saddled with, and we certainly value these sites — even though we have to pay for them. We think it's nice, though, that DesertExposure.com readers can enjoy every page of our Web site for free and without any login or password hassles.

Judging by the burgeoning traffic on our site, our users apparently agree.

Fans of the "dead-tree" edition of Desert Exposure shouldn't fret, however, that we'll be going digital-only any time soon. We're big fans of the print medium, having worked in ink-on-paper for more years than we care to count. There's nothing quite like opening the freshly printed pages of a new issue, hot off the presses, and seeing a month's worth of labors made real for thousands of readers. We even love the inky smell that pervades our cars when we're out delivering. (The electronic edition does have the advantage, however, of not requiring a stint in the hot tub after delivering it — bits and bytes are definitely easier on the back.)

No, you'll continue to enjoy Desert Exposure in its original format throughout 2008 and for many years to come. In fact, one of the beauties of including online advertising automatically with a print-ad buy — unlike most publication sites, which sell Web ads separately — is that the new medium thereby helps support the old. We like the idea of rewarding our print advertisers — who make possible the publication you hold in your hands (if you're reading this in ink-on-paper, that is) — by making them part of our digital experience as well. It's an innovative way, we think, that the print and digital versions of Desert Exposure can march forward together into the future.

Down the road, who knows? Maybe by the time we're too old and weary to deliver print copies of Desert Exposure each month, technology will have solved that challenge, too. Bring on the delivery robots!

Resolving Our Problems

We modestly suggest resolutions for New Mexico candidates and activists, left and right, in the election year ahead.

With January 2008 kicking off the season of new year's resolutions as well as an election year, we'd like to be so bold as to offer some suggested resolutions for partisans of both sides. Not only is our governor running for president — a situation that we realize may no longer be the case if you're reading this after this month's Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary — but New Mexico has a wide-open US Senate race and not one but three incumbent-unencumbered US House races. So 2008 promises to be an epochal year for politics in the Land of Enchantment.

We'd like to hope that 2008 could also be an election year in which results count more than rhetoric, the national interest outweighs special interests and facts matter more than sound bites. In that spirit, we modestly offer these resolutions for consideration by candidates as well as true believers of both the left and the right:

On the left: Resolve, please, to be less shrill and finger-wagging in your denunciations of what is, for better or worse, the American way of life — even given all its admitted excesses, greenhouse-gas emissions and global big-footedness. You will never achieve the changes you so ardently seek by scolding Americans or appealing to our guilt. Similarly, resolve to restrain your glee over the imminent (perhaps) collapse of our consumer lifestyle, the end of the petroleum era, global warming and other ways in which you see greedy, polluting Americans at last getting what's coming to us. It's not helpful, and it simply postpones the day when our elected officials might deal with the challenges you foresee.

Resolve to read at least one economics textbook in 2008. The world's ills cannot be fixed by waving a magic wand, and wishing doesn't make it so, especially when it comes to dollars and cents. Properly applied, economic incentives can be as powerful a force for positive change as for corporate greed. Keep in mind that the last president to balance the budget was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, and that the thriving economy engineered in part by his treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, benefited Americans across the board.

As you prepare to nominate, quite possibly, either a white woman or a black man for the presidency, resolve to give white males a break. We did not personally give smallpox-ridden blankets to the American Indians, captain slave ships or deny women equal suffrage. To make America all that it can be, you just might need us, too.

On the extreme left, please resolve not to point to third-world dictators and bullies as exemplars of how the world oughta be, nor to go all goo-goo-eyed over some latterday Castro's anti-Americanism. If you lived in these third-world countries, you'd be among the first loudmouths whom their anti-democratic, anti-dissent rulers clap in jail. Besides, praising Castro and Ho Chi Minh did not play well for the leftist activists of the 1960s; an updated version will go over even less well with Joe and Jane Average American today. Che Guevara is dead — get over it.

Most important, for all the true believers and activists on the left of the political spectrum, resolve in 2008 to offer a positive vision for America. Show us how we can be better than we are and how we can do better than we've dreamed. Remember the example of President John F. Kennedy, who is enshrined among the greats today not so much for the accomplishments of his all-too-brief administration, but for his breadth of vision and call to America to greatness.

On the right: As campaign 2008 unfolds, resolve not to confuse the evils of illegal immigration with the immigrants themselves, or with Hispanics in general. Resist the temptation to demonize Hispanics as you decry illegal immigration. Keep in mind that much of the fault for illegal immigration lies with the employers — typically, your constituency — who attract cheap workers across the border with the promise of jobs.

As you march onward with your fellow Christian soldiers in the 2008 campaign, resolve to remember the difference between being motivated by your faith and imposing your religion on others. Despite what you may have been told by ill-informed zealots, this country was explicitly not founded as a Christian nation, the word "God" never appears — not once — in the US Constitution, and the Founding Fathers were overrepresented with skeptics, Unitarians and deists. So resolve, if you please, to share with your country only the best of your faith, to show us what a "Christian nation" could be if its leaders truly paid attention to what Jesus preached.

Speaking of the so-called religious right, consider a resolution in 2008 to put your fervent opposition to abortion into practice — by supporting birth control, sex education (the real thing, not just abstinence education) and other measures that would truly help reduce the number of abortions. Americans may continue to disagree about the morality of abortion and the wisdom of keeping it legal, but we can agree on the desirability of making it rare.

Resolve to remember that there is nothing inherently "conservative" about multinational corporations, hedge funds or rich people, which often seem the only things the right cares about "conserving" any more. If you hate taxes, hate them for the middle class, not just the wealthy. Unchecked corporate power, like any other, can corrupt rather than conserve the values you cherish. Resolve to spend more time listening to Main Street than to Wall Street.

Resolve, above all, to rediscover the best of the party of Barry Goldwater, who valued individual liberty enough that he would have abhorred the Patriot Act. And whatever happened to conservatives who insisted on a balanced budget? We've read enough history, too, to know that American conservatives once had a strong anti-interventionist streak and were leery of establishing a Pax Americana across the globe. Where did all those conservatives run off to when their "neo" counterparts were dragging us into a quagmire in Iraq? And what in the world is "conservative" about a practice as un-American as waterboarding? We'd urge our friends on the right to rediscover their backbones and core principles — so Americans might have, in Goldwater's phrase, "a choice, not an echo." A choice between welfare statism on the left and corporate statism on the right was not what he had in mind.

Can we have a 2008 campaign — for the presidency, for the US Senate and those three House seats — that presents New Mexico voters with principled alternatives, reasoned out rather than packaged in 30-second TV spots? Can we have candidates who may disagree passionately about what's best for America, but who agree just as passionately what is best about America? Could we, just this once, have an election about policies instead of platitudes?

We can, each of us, resolve in 2008 to reward with our votes only those candidates who represent their viewpoints with clarity and courage. If we keep that new year's resolution, it will make it much harder for our politicians not to keep theirs.