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Guerrilla Radio News Corp Presents:
Reflection: The Review of the Review

Hello again everyone, and welcome to the last article in this series.

This article is about my recent issue of The Review. You may wish to read it first if you haven’t already. [Part 1] [Part 2]



The Road to the Review

I think the most sensible topic to start this article with is how I came to write this review in the first place.

The idea for this came to me around the congress elections. For those of you who’ve been here a while, you may remember the congress reviews that used to be posted around the elections. I can’t honestly remember who wrote them (I used to think it was Sammy but I couldn’t find them in his newspaper) but they were something that I loved to read and I thought that being able see someone’s perspective on the performances of the congressmen (especially for me in my terms) was very useful.

I originally intended this to simply be a review of the CP himself, but after a while I decided that it could be useful to review the cabinet as well. I also wanted it to be unique and not just a re-make of the old congress review articles for different elections. That’s when I decided to use the cabinet’s opinions as well.

The premise for this new article was simple: A review of the cabinet, by the cabinet with a few words of advice from me so that hopefully future ministers could look back at it and gain an insight into what kind of standards are expected of a minister.

This idea unfortunately fell through.

I did contact each minister to try and get a short statement from them about their own performance and about the performance of the CP but there were a few problems: Some of them didn’t take it seriously, some weren’t happy about me printing what they said and some didn’t bother to reply at all. For a while I seriously doubted that this article would ever be published.

Luckily, I managed to find a way to salvage it.

Fortunately for me, Sammy (the CP), had done exactly what I had asked of him and sent me a one sentence statement about each of his ministers, plus a short self-review. This meant that I could still write a review of everyone, but only include statements from Sammy (and judging from the length of the finished article, that was probably for the best).

And that was how The Review was born



The Review of the Review

Even though it wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for, I think that the article came out very well.
In hindsight, only using the president’s comments was probably for the best as it kept it to two articles rather than three. The comments from the ministers were very useful though and I’m still glad I collected them as well. Knowing what they themselves thought made me a lot more confident in my reviews and hopefully made them a better quality.

On this process as a whole, it has defiantly been a great learning experience for me. This is the first time that I have published an article that required prior planning and I am sure that I will be a lot more efficient next month.

I have a lot more things that I will try to do next elections (such as my planned candidate reviews that unfortunately never made it to print) and I’m sure they will go well after the relative success of this.



Special Mention

Although she thinks I’ve praised here too much already, I do have to give a shout out to Mittekemuis (that was the first time I’ve spelt her name right without looking 😃) for how seriously she took this project.

I did only ask for one sentence statements so I’m not saying that future ministers should necessarily do this, but I have to praise her for her report which was 3 PMs long, very detailed and painfully honest. She also contacted me on IRC beforehand so that she could discuss it.

I think that she was way too hard on herself in some places and in a few others, she's a bit naive, but I was really touched by how seriously she took it.



Closing Words

This was a great experience for me, and hopefully a great read for you. To every cabinet member that made this possible and every person who voted, commented and whatever on either of the articles,

I thank you.

-Jacob Medrolke
Guerrilla Radio News Corp.



Next time on Guerrilla Radio:
Something to do with the Congress Elections

This is it for a while, but I am hoping to do something based around the congress elections later this month. I’ve got a few things up my sleeve, but you’ll have to wait and see…