Once upon a time, the Marquee desk had a blog. And on this blog, reporters and editors would discuss and debate whatever topics they chose regarding arts and entertainment in Milwaukee. It was a glorious era, marked with the sounds of trumpets when readers left comments praising the insightful eyes of the staff and accolades that began to pile up behind the Marquee editors’ desks until the structural integrity of the pile grew unsustainable.

At least, that’s how we’d like to imagine it.

The truth is, we here on Marquee haven’t had a regular blog in many a moon, a phrase which here means “before your fearless editor was on this desk.” There were a few haphazard entries here and there, but Marquee content generally stayed in print first, and online second.

But that’s all changing, thanks to hittingthemarq.com. That’s not what it’s really called — turns out picking up your own domain name costs a fair chunk of change and more time than we wanted to spend — but it’s how I’d like to think of it.

Based on our usual Trib site, Hitting the Marq Online will offer daily contributions from our Marquee staff (and our visual content editor Dylan — but that’s another story) and one Mystery Guest a week, pulled from current employees, veteran Tribbers or our former staffers abroad. Our general focus, as in print and our regular online content, will be on the arts, but we might let ourselves get off topic every once in a while if something less artsy catches our eye — and who knows what our Mystery Guests will come up with.

Hitting the Marq’ll still be showing up in print every so often, offering up examples of our online content, but online is where our focus is for the concept. If you’re interested in keeping tabs on us, we’ve set up a Twitter account where you can follow us; our handle is HittingtheMarq, so it’s nice and easy to remember. You can also find us on marquettetribune.org as usual, under the Marquee tab.

Hope to see you there!