Another year has come and gone and we at the Backloggers find ourselves at our anniversary for this blog.  We’ve definitely seen more active years in the past, but we got to try out a few new ideas and were invited to participate in some very fun and interesting new experiences.  As is usual, we’d like to look back on what we were up to this last year, but also what we’ve learned and can do better.

Rather than our more wordy approaches in the past, we’ve decided that we want to refine the anniversary post, as well as all our future content, and make it a lot more manageable for us.  The plan is to be consistent and streamlined as we dedicate ourselves to doing better this coming year. So how about we begin with what we were up to this past year?

Retrospective

One funny thing about blogging and doing podcasts is that while there’s a big sense that they’re these very casual, hobby-centric things (and for us, that is still a big aspect of this), you end up fidgeting a lot with the work you do in it. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, and some of it you aren’t really sure of either way. But the bottom line is that you can step back and take stock of things like that. In a somewhat serendipitous coincidence, the anniversary for The Backloggers falls smack dab in the middle of January, so we can catch some of that big “new year, new blog” energy and figure out where to go from here?

There were for sure a lot of things this year that didn’t work for us, or things that weren’t adhered to as hard as we would have liked. The manga Pick of the Month series, for instance, had a fairly short run; our in-depth analysis pieces were pretty few and far between; and some of our other series, like [Short Thoughts] and [Season Samplers] got, oh, one apiece? It also probably didn’t help that we didn’t have a timeline or any kind of deadlines for, well, anything, sans recording our podcasts.

That’s not to say that we didn’t have any ups, because we honestly had a pretty cool year as a blog. We were asked to do a review of the weird gekimation film Violence Voyager and were nominated for a fun little blog award thing called the Sunshine Award, which proved to be a lot of fun participating in. We also got to pilot our Lil’ Log and Campfire Cast subgenres of the Log Time Podcast this year, which have proved to be cool deviations from our general podcast formula. We also started to actually schedule stuff for the blog in the eleventh hour this year, such as post drafts and such (we definitely have an English professor on deck, haha) and it turned out to be really effective, helping us get out some really solid content we were all happy with. Honestly, while a lot of this past year was not as optimal as we would have liked for it to be, sometimes it just takes a few small clicks to kick things back into high gear.

2020

Looking towards our performance in 2020, we can’t promise that we’re elevating our content level or beginning to try something new as we’ve done in the past. However, we can promise that our content will be more timely and more consistent throughout the year and hopefully for the future of this blog as well. We’re focused on refining our current content series’ involving manga and seasonal anime, finding what does and doesn’t work for us, and bringing a more overall cohesive experience to the table.

What this means is that you’re going to get more of the classic content such as the Picks of the Month and the Season Sampler posts (albeit with some major restructuring), along with our typical long-form analytical content, but with more focus, better behind-the-scenes planning, and a touch of that Backloggers Magic™. And who knows? Maybe once we hit our stride, we can look into making waves with some new content, but right now we’re mostly focused on going back to basics over anything else.

We know we’ve promised a lot in the past, but this time we have something to show for the improvements and re-structuring changes we’re planning to make on this blog. As a proof of concept of the changes we’re talking about, we would like to point out our latest Anime of the Decade posts. We would like to see to it that every post of ours be as organized and well-thought-out as that series was. We’ve realized that’s the bare minimum we need to be successful and for everyone to be satisfied with the content that we produce.

Final Thoughts

The past year was not our strongest but it was one that we have learned a lot from and will actively dedicate ourselves to improving upon.  Going back to fundamentals and improving our structuring will hopefully allow us to give you all a lot of consistent and good content this coming year.  We hope you’re excited for what we’re bringing to the table and we’re very much looking forward to sharing this new year and new decade with you all!