A Bill Kuchman Pop-Ed: Here's to a Great 2013 and the Potential of 2014

The new year may be over a week old, but since the Pop-Ed team has been off since before Christmas, I wanted to take a second and look back at what Popculturology did in 2013 and what we still want to do in 2014.

At the end of 2012, I set out a few goals for Popculturology. I wanted to do some awesome Oscar coverage, add more commentary, get a least one female voice writing for the site and finally finish the transition from The Bill Kuchman Chronicle to Popculturology (if you remember the TBKC days, you've been a reader of this site for a long time).

So just how great was 2013 for Popculturology? We checked off every one of those goals. There was a live blog covering Oscar night. Our commentary section exploded thanks to the Pop-Eds. Not only did we take the original team of myself, Seth Pohorence, Anton Ali and Scott Pukos, but we also added Lindsay Campbell, Will Cleveland and Charlie Bielinski, and made it everyone's mission to write a Pop-Ed a week. Thanks to this venture, Popculturology has been able to cover topics as varied as Kanye West's new album to the biggest celebrity breakups of 2013. (In addition to those writers, Tim Kuchman also joined the site as a copy editor, cleaning up our mistakes behind the scenes.) And yes, popculturology.com has been up and running for almost a year now.

In addition to working off the list of goals we made going into the year, Popculturology also launched an ambitious redesign. I put a lot of work into the old design of the site, but it just wasn't cutting in when it came to maximizing Popculturology's potential. That design served us well we were still a blog, but we're not living in the age of blogs anymore. Our readers needed to have more options than just being able to scroll through the seven most recent articles. Thanks to the redesign, Popculturology readers now have a bunch of ways to sort what they read on the site.

The only goal from 2013 that Popculturology didn't check off was launching a podcast. It's definitely still on our list of goals, but I don't want to launch one until we know we can do it right. Should it be a podcast or should we push for video too? How do we bring together a bunch of writers who don't live in the same city and do it in a way that delivers original, creative and engaging content for our readers?

Which brings me to the readers. Thanks to you guys (and a push from Reddit now and then), Popculturology set several traffic records for the site during 2013, including breaking our monthly record in October ... and then breaking that record again in November.

Sure, we write for Popculturology since we love pop culture, movies, TV shows, music, funny Internet videos and pictures of Kate Upton, but without readers, we're just talking to ourselves (which is something we do anyways). You guys let us live out our dreams of writing about pop culture, even if it's just in a tiny way.

Thanks for 2013. Let's make 2014 great.