Monday, March 23, 2009

In lieu of an open thread this week...

...could anybody who has a question for me try e-mailing me over the next couple of days? The bosses want me to resurrect the mailbag column I used to do on a weekly basis, but it's been so long since I've done one regularly that most of the feedback I get is via blog comments.

I hope that if I start running them on at least a semi-regular basis, the readers will get back into the habit of sometimes e-mailing their questions (or, in rare cases usually involving senior citizens, snail-mailing them), and then the machine will perpetuate itself the way it used to.

I obviously can't promise to answer everyone's question -- limited space in the paper versus unlimited space on a blog -- but I'll try to cherrypick the best ones, and if yours doesn't come up, feel free to post it as a comment the next time I do a real open thread. All I ask is that you include your full name and the city/town where you currently live, as we need that to run any letters. Being from Jersey is not mandatory, and ask anything TV-related at all.

Just do me one favor and try to include the word "mailbag" somewhere in your subject line or the body of the e-mail. I get several hundred useless PR e-mails a day, and when I don't have time to go in and delete them all, it helps to have a keyword I can search for.

8 comments:

  1. Not a Mailbag comment.

    Out of curiosity, is this blog an official part of your duties as TV guru at the Star-Ledger, or do you do it more for fun? If it's official, why is here on blogspot and not at the Star-Ledger site (like, for example, Mo Ryan's is)?

    Back in the 70s when I lived in Edison NJ, we used to get the Star-Ledger as the morning paper and the News Tribune as the afternoon paper. Sometime in the 80s, I understand, the NT merged with the Home News, but that was after I left (1981). How strange it is now to think that not only did did the area support two newspapers (one state, one local) but that we subscribed to both.

    Word verification: frapp.

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  2. It's complicated, but the blog is more or less part of my job, which is why most of its content is mirrored at NJ.com.

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  3. alan, i think you can change that link to include the word mailbag. let's see if blogger will let me do this

    maybe not - anyway, it would be mailto:alan@wherever.com?subject="Mailbag"

    and if you can't see that cause blogger is getting cute
    after your email address put a question mark then the word subject, an equals sign and the word Mailbag - don't use any spaces at all (not sure if you need quotes around Mailbag. I forget. seems like a good idea though)

    I do this too, with links on my website, to keep from tossing people out with the spam.

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  4. Just got around to watching season finale of Dexter, and along with finales of Brotherhood and series finale of L Word they are examples of writers not knowing how to wrap up interesting seasons much less series. Not everyone can be a Wire or Shield or Lost but given the high quality of many of these series they deserved better.

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  5. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  6. You need to give Eastbound and Down another chance. I mean if you're going to spend time watching crap like HIMYM, you might as well give EB&D 3 hours of your precious time.

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  7. Okay, this is not an open thread, and I'm shutting down comments on it.

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