The scare quotes in the headline reference the irony of labeling any of you guys "guests," when most of you have been around these parts much longer than I. We'll work on a better name for this experiment as it progresses, but for now I have the good news that we have very tentative approval to begin the columns next week.
To recap, the basic intent is to give our commenters the ability to lead the discussion on The Opinion Blog in a slightly more prominent and creative way than is possible right now. I'm imagining a concept similar to a weekly op-ed columnist in a dead-tree edition of a newspaper, but because we represent the new media, we can be much freer in form: no word limits or minimums, no set topic (unless you choose to develop one), the freedom to insert actual images and links, and if you can't do it one week there's not going to be a big hole on a page that anyone has to scramble to fill. It's a blog-within-a-blog, or maybe a column-within-a-blog, but either way it's an opportunity for the widely divergent opinions that you guys hold to drive the discourse even more than you do now.
Being that we're still under the aegis of The Sun News, however, we've got to stick to some of the strictures of Traditional Journalism. First and foremost, anyone that we give this space to must use their real name, and secondly there's a certain level of decorum that we want to maintain in these posts, even if we're sometimes looser in our comments to one another. I think what that means is that in the sense that these posts are intended as conversation starters, we probably want to craft them that way, as standalone items (which most would be anyway), rather than mere responses to the previous day's open forums, for example. This would probably happen 99 percent of the time anyway - and I certainly don't mean we wouldn't reference one another's comments, just that we wouldn't directly address one another in the post, if that makes sense.
(Denney forcefully and eloquently explained some of the legalities at play in this post, if you're interested.)
If you're interested, email me at rmorris (at) thesunnews.com with an idea of which day(s) you might be interested in, or which days absolutely won't work for you (Sunny and Ron - I've got both your notes already). I'll let you guys know a tentative schedule by the end of the weekend, and if anyone wants to sit it out at first and join later, that's fine too. As mentioned above, this is an experiment, a different way of conducting a conversation we all genuinely enjoy, and I'm sure we'll continue to modify it moving forward.
To anyone foolish enough to believe -- and say -- that blog participants who disagree with them must be impaired, as one commenter unwisely said of another over the weekend:
Comments that impute impairment, such as drunkenness, are defamatory. Defamation means an untruth (lie) that holds a person up to scorn, ridicule and public disapprobation, or hampers a person's ability to earn a living. The courts in this country have ruled consistently since colonial days that persons who prove defamation can recover damages in civil court.
In the case of this blog, the liability for defamation falls entirely upon the commenter who makes a defamatory remark, not upon me or The Sun News. Only if I edit an offensive comment do I make myself and the newspaper part of the path of publication. And according to the law, only if you're in the path of publication can you be sued.