With the new year approaching -- and TAP Online in the midst of a one-week vacation -- it seems an appropriate time to provide our readers with an update on what our Web site has accomplished during the last few months, and where we hope to take it in the months to come.
I took over as editor of TAP Online in September. During the last four months, TAP Online has dramatically increased the amount -- and range -- of online material we publish on a daily basis. We are now publishing an average of two to three Web-only articles per day, a dramatic increase over our previous output. And while we continue to devote much of this space to the kind of argumentative pieces that have long been the site's staple, we have begun to publish regular reported dispatches -- from Washington, from around the nation and from points around the globe. Regular visitors to our site have probably noticed that our correspondents have recently filed reports from London and Rio de Janeiro and Asmara, Eritrea (to name just a few of the locations from which our writers have analyzed breaking events during the past several months). Closer to home, Prospect senior editor Mary Lynn F. Jones has brought new life to TAP Online's coverage of Capitol Hill, writing frequently on every aspect of legislative politics inside the Beltway. And everyone else -- from TAP's top editors to our fall-semester interns -- has been supplementing his or her work for the print magazine by contributing regular columns to the online edition.
Not to be overlooked in all this has been the success of our Web log, Tapped. We launched a redesigned Tapped in mid-October, giving it an improved look that distinguished it visually from the rest of our site while also adding permanent links to articles from the print magazine and TAP Online. Whether inciting arguments on the right and left flanks of the blog world or analyzing the news of the moment, Tapped has continued to fulfill its original mission: providing one of the best sources of quick, topical, continuous liberal commentary throughout the day.
As we've offered more and more content throughout the fall, both TAP Online and Tapped are seeing their numbers of regular viewers rise. For that, we have you to thank. We hope in the year to come -- as we undertake a redesign of the site and continue to increase the amount of Web-only content we offer on a daily basis -- that TAP Online will remain the most compelling place on the Web to find thought-provoking liberal journalism. And we hope you'll continue to make us a part of your daily reading.
We'll return to our full online publishing schedule on Monday, Dec. 30. Until then, I leave you with three of the more important pieces TAP Online has published in the last several months: an in-depth report from Buenos Aires, Argentina, on how South American countries may be downplaying the threat of Islamic terrorism, to their own peril and perhaps to ours as well; a piece reported from Hanoi, Vietnam, looking at the devastating effects on the Third World of America's "export ban" on generic AIDS drugs; and an article looking at Richard Hines -- the southern apologist who helped George W. Bush win South Carolina in 2000 -- and the other Confederate skeletons in the Bush administration's closet.
Happy holidays.
Richard Just
Editor, The American Prospect Online
