I appreciate you writing about The Faster Times, but I don’t think you’ve really given the site a fair shot. First, I think if you spend some time reading through the site, you’ll see that the quality of the writing and thinking is far better and more original than what you’ll find on a typical blog. That’s not to say that every post is a work of art, only that if you read enough, you’ll see that our writers are turning out very high quality work every day. Also, if you check out our world section, you’ll see that we have correspondents stationed all over the world and that they’re turning out pretty fascinating accounts of life in their respective countries. Considering that just about every major paper is cutting its for foreign reporting down, I think it’s pretty exciting that we’ve been able to put an operation like this together. We’ll be doing something similar across the U.S. in the coming months. We’re also rather idiosyncratic in our coverage — see our baseball and philosophy or death or pro wrestling sections. I could go on about how we’re unique, but I do think it’s fair to say that we haven’t yet achieved two of our most important goals — making real money for our writers and breaking news on a regular basis. Of course, the more money we make, the more we’ll be able to spend on reporting. I think that if we pull off the money and the reporting, we’ll have really done something pretty exceptional and to that end, we’re introducing a bunch of interesting experiments in the months ahead. We’ve only been up and running for six months and we’ve already developed quite a large readership. I hope you’ll keep reading and give us a shot. -Sam Apple