Where have all the Editorials Gone? (Can we bring them back please?)

I agree. I hope the admins will bring back the editorials, give them more visibility, and fix the new writer issue.

I don't understand why the admins have been phasing out editorials. It was a good feature.

 mjf314:

I agree. I hope the admins will bring back the editorials, give them more visibility, and fix the new writer issue.

I don't understand why the admins have been phasing out editorials. It was a good feature.

I don't understand it either. The editorials always did consistently well, and they added something to the site you can't find other places.

I really loved the editorials. When I first joined MDL, I went and looked through them, going back 2 or 3 years to read any that seemed interesting and they were really useful, especially when you're new to Asian dramas. I really hope they fix the issues soon and even encourage users to create them.

The editorials are what made MDL a special site to subscribe to and follow.  I read almost every editorial in-depth and enjoyed making comments if I had watched the drama or I added the drama to my list based on the content of the many comments that viewers made to the editorials.  They are and should continue to be a priceless addition to MDL.  I noticed that MDL converted into a site that highlighted gossip from Korean dramas or ratings only for Korean dramas.  This has become one of the annoying features of this site because I typically watch Chinese and Japanese dramas and only revert to Korean dramas when there are down periods of outstanding dramas from these two countries.  I hold no prejudice against Korean dramas since this is where I started back in 2013 and I watched every drama I could during my retirement to catch up with all of the outstanding ones that were featured.  However, over time I discovered costumes and historical dramas from other countries  (including Thailand.  Editorials were the source of allowing me to become more diversified in my view times.   Please consider bringing these precious editorials back.     Not every editorial is suitable for every subscriber and I understand that this may be a reason to just drop the feature.    Maybe conducting a poll monthly of the highest-rated dramas subscribers would like to read editorials about would help siphon off topics that may be unacceptable to the majority of viewers.   

When was the last time a news article was about anything other than K-dramas or K-actors? 

This site has become All-K-Dramas-All-The-Time and it feels very skewed.

Thank you for opening this suggestion! I voted this up 3 votes out of 3, and here are my 2 cents: 

- Editorials need their own place again on the site -- a visible and easy to navigate to place. And no, the tiny lettered "Editorials" tab isn't helping; it's barely noticeable, and no one but the 10-20 or so people who asked about it back then would even know about it, I bet!

- The scum news articles are obviously here to stay, so I guess we as users will not be able to do anything about it, so I suggest a different solution: Make both articles/editorials and those fleeting news available in their own venue. Make banners/scrolling headers for both in a different place, if possible. Heck, maybe a special page for Editorials would be cool, like we have for Lists! But if that's done, they also need their own shortcut in the front page, a visible one, please!!

Some info/perspective: 

- According to Editorials tab, the last editorial to be published was 24 days ago, this one. But let's be honest, the last real one (the one that's written by a regular MDL user and not an employee) was more than 3 months ago (it's this one, on July 16th). This one has so far garnered 96 likes and 149 comments. By comparison, the last news article to garner more than 100 comments was 2 days ago, on an article about... a celebrities' breakup! Yes, very drama related, thank you, whoever decided this was a good idea...

- I really don't remember when was the last time an Editorial lasted for more than a couple of hours in the rolling banner of the front page, but it must be more than a year ago at least -- but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. No surprise that users are just not interested in writing for MDL anymore. 

- You can't even browse through older articles that easily anymore. The Articles page only goes back to February 2020 (Maybe because there are very few News articles before that? Or more specifically, the News Articles were mostly of an entirely different kind than the copy-paste of nowadays.), and searching with keywords also only goes that far back. To find older articles, you need to browse through users' profiles /articles tab for example, or be lucky to stumble upon it on a specific Drama's page or Person's page. Or have its link directly.

That's it for now, and if DramaHeroine doesn't mind, I intend to share this suggestion to the feeds & to some friends to keep the discussion going! 

Estell, you make some really good points/suggestions.

"Editorials need their own place again on the site -- a visible and easy to navigate to place. And no, the tiny lettered "Editorials" tab isn't helping; it's barely noticeable, and no one but the 10-20 or so people who asked about it back then would even know about it, I bet! ... Make both articles/editorials and those fleeting news available in their own venue. Make banners/scrolling headers for both in a different place, if possible. Heck, maybe a special page for Editorials would be cool, like we have for Lists! But if that's done, they also need their own shortcut in the front page, a visible one, please!!'"

I 100% agree with giving editorials and news separate sections on the main page of the website. That right there I think would solve visibility issue. I don't think having a separate page that operates in the same way as for lists would work though, because you'd still have the issue of visibility.

"The scum news articles are obviously here to stay, so I guess we as users will not be able to do anything about it..."

I won't go so far as to call the news articles scum, but I don't like the majority of them. And I know they probably won't go away entirely, but there are some specific types of articles I would like to stop seeing.

*Articles about very niche/nitpicky scandals/controversies that only really matter to netizens in Korea for cultural reasons. I looked through the news articles yesterday, and there's one about an actor apologizing for not disposing of cigarette butts properly. Sure, it's annoying that people do that, but that is not worthy of a news article. While I don't personally smoke, there are plenty of average, every-day people who are guilty of this. In the grand scheme of things, this is not the worst thing someone could do.

*You mention an article about a celeb breakup below, and I have to agree that I don't want to know about people breaking up. Let people go through heartbreak in private. I am okay with articles about people getting married or welcoming children into the world, but I wish these news stories would be collected together into one periodic article instead of each getting a separate article. It's nice to celebrate with an actor over a life achievement, but we don't need to be so constantly informed of these things.

"According to Editorials tab, the last editorial to be published was 24 days ago, this one. But let's be honest, the last real one (the one that's written by an MDL user and not an employee) was more than 3 months ago (it's this one, on July 16th). This one has so far garnered 96 likes and 149 comments. By comparison, the last news article to garner more than 100 comments was 2 days ago, on an article about... a celebrities' breakup! Yes, very drama related, thank you, whoever decided this was a good idea..."

I'm under the impression that the writers who write the news articles are also MDL users just being paid as well, so I want to be careful with my characterization of them. But your point about engagement is spot on.

"You can't even browse through older articles that easily anymore. The Articles page only goes back to February 2020 (Maybe because there are very few News articles before that? Or more specifically, the News Articles were mostly of an entirely different kind than the copy-paste of nowadays), and searching with keywords also only goes that far back. To find older articles, you need to browse through users' profiles /articles tab for example, or be lucky to stumble upon it on a specific Drama's page or Person's page. Or have its link directly."

This one makes me particularly sad. I tried to go back into the archives while writing this post to find some older editorials for reference, and it was like pulling teeth. I had to go to the contributors' page and pulling up individual people's profiles to see if they'd written any editorials before I could find what I was looking for. Think about all of the old editorials that are essentially lost to time because of this.

'That's it for now, and if DramaHeroine doesn't mind, I intend to share this suggestion to the feeds & to some friends to keep the discussion going!'

Please do! I want as many people's perspectives and thoughts on this as possible.