Today marks the first anniversary of Fox and Hounds Daily.
Our goal in creating this site was to bring together varying voices to debate and illuminate the issues affecting business and politics in California.
Our best-read pieces didn’t hone to a specific political ideology or theme. Jon Coupal’s argument for shared sacrifice from the public sector and supporting furloughs for public employees proved extremely popular, as did Allan Hoffenblum’s view of the falling fortunes of the California Republican Party and Chandra Sharma’s business take on building a football stadium in Los Angeles.
Our readers clearly have multiple interests.
At times, we’ve been ahead of the game. Just yesterday, our blogger, Joe Mathews, heard from the governor that he would issue two reports on Thursday, one to summarize budget options if the special election measures pass, the other if they fail. We posted the news quickly. Another example: Many of our viewers rushed to read a guest blog explaining how CNN claimed to interview a USC College Republican about the faltering McCain presidential campaign on campus—when the truth was that the student was not a College Republican at all, but rather a relative of the producer.
At times, we have been prescient. This site predicted correctly that the state tax commission would delay its report date until after the special election so as not to influence the special election campaigns.
But, we are not always spot on — at least according to the polls. My piece regarding Framework for a Budget Deal, published a month before the actual budget was revealed, predicted the deal would include a spending limit and taxes going to the voters, with the taxes ending early if the spending limit failed at the polls. The miss? I said I thought the voters would accept this deal. The polls today say differently.
We’ve had posts bring in links from many sites even from well beyond California’s borders, for example in the New York Post and Forbes.com.
We’ve hit many of the marks that we set, but not all. This site will evolve, and hopefully will continue to become more beneficial to our readers.
Our contributors have done a terrific job engaging in the debate on how to best govern California and to deal with the many issues confronting business in the state.
Most of all, I appreciate our readers. Our promise to you is to work on improving our product and to keep you both entertained and informed.