Welcome to the CFC's new Newsfeed

Hello.

About one month ago the CFC choose me to be the new editor of their monthly newsletter. Part of the new editor's job is to expand the current CFC newsfeed. The site you are looking at now is the first ascent in that process, our basecamp.

Goal
The CFC's RFP asked for a newsfeed that would, “emulate ChessBase in the extensiveness of its content”.

My initial reaction was: “why bother?” After all, chessbase.com is both excellent and free, and it's only one of many excellent free chess websites.

The only reasonable response I could come up with is that there is no point trying to compete with the excellent chess sites out there. As I put it in my Proposal:

The CFC Newsletter is distributed by the internet, so the only people who can get it have an internet connection. The internet has instant, live, well-annotated, video-enhanced coverage of all the major international events. Best of all, in my opinion, they have video of the players doing their post-mortems, which sites transcribe and show with computer-checked improvements. There is no way a limited-budget newsletter can compete with that, and it is a waste of resources to try.
A truly outstanding game --- e.g. Aronian-Anand, TATA 2013 --- ought to be included just to make sure even the least internet-savvy CFC members will see it. But there is just no point reproducing cross-tables or game scores from major events when anyone with an internet connection can go to the tournament site, or Chessdom, or ChessBase, or the Chessvibes news aggregator, and find high-quality analysis with photos, videos, clickable games, downloadable scores etc. etc.... all within minutes of the games. Why should a monthly newsletter try to top that?

This Newsfeed is not competing with those websites: when you want international chess content, visit them. [I do, I will.]

Instead, our goal is to provide our visitors with at least five items of Canadian chess content per week.

This is more ambitious than it sounds. Please consider the following: compared to Canada, Germany has a larger population, far more registered chess players, a professional chess league that includes many of the world's best players, and a history of holding regular world-class events; but the German-language ChessBase site (de.chessbase.com) doesn't come close to producing five stories per week about German chess.
[having written that, “ambitious” is clearly too weak. But “doomed” isn't better, even if it is more accurate. We'll see. - JKU]

To meet this ambitious goal I have the pleasure of collaborating with Félix Dumont and the volunteers he's assembled from the McGill Chess Club. I'll leave it to Félix to introduce them, and their news posts to recommend them.

I'm happy with the progress we've made so far: we have a team of contributors who know what their responsibilities are, and we already have a site that's a cleaner faster-loading version of the main CFC site. It doesn't look as sharp it will – is it even possible to create a duller-looking site than grey on brown? – but it looks much better than anyone (including me) could have reasonably expected: the site was built by Shao Hang He in late April, while he was finishing his year-end exams at McGill. If this is what we can do under severe time-pressure, I look forward to finding out what we can do when we have time to be creative.

I hope we'll all enjoy finding out.

- John Upper

PS: as you can see, there is a link up there on the right labelled “CCN Preview”. I will use that to post about the upcoming CFC Newsletters. “My” first issue comes out in June. Previews depend on contributors meeting (or beating) their deadlines, and I have no idea yet how often that will happen. I will post an article here in mid-May about what you can expect from the new Newsletter.