Ask Swampland

Josh Tyrangiel, the with-it whiz kid who is going to save Time from dead tree hell, tells me that we will soon (-ish) be adding video to the Swamp. One idea for incorporating this new fangled technology is to have it be a Q&A between you, the citizens of the commentsphere, and us, your humble correspondents. It would work like this: We post a call for questions, you use the comment thread to pose queries that you’d like to see us answer and then, at the end of the week, we do a little video podcast wherein we (most likely me + Jay or Karen, as Joe isn’t always around) attempt to shed some light on the pressing issues of the day.

I am confident that the conversation here has reached a level where we don’t have to worry about getting “good” questions. You all know that we read and try to respond to commenters that raise legitimate/important/interesting issues and I suspect opening up the floor more explicitly will lead to even more thoughtful dialog. Shall we do a dry run to test that theory?

We don’t have the video capability, but I can answer questions posed in this comment thread the old fashioned way: written, in a post on Friday. I don’t have any guidelines for you, besides noting that, perhaps obviously, there’s a limit to both the kind and number of questions I can answer and still stay employed. But other than things that would get me fired, feel free to make your inquiries wide-ranging — anything from what the Chris Matthews green room is like to, ah, how I feel about Time’s DoJ coverage. Trivia, policy, whatever.

And as my mom said, if you ask nicely, who knows what you’ll get.

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