It was supposed to be a soft launch. Those of us who masterminded this site at the end of 2004 had planned to announce Pensito Review to the world around the first of June – meaning, now – after a phased-in deployment, during which we slowly but steadily built our readership.

What we hadn’t factored in, however, was the target-rich environment we would find ourselves in. It turns out that in the present historic moment – the dawning nadir of the Bush Era – there is an eager readership for a site that covers liberal politics and media. Because the perspective of the Left is so under-represented, we have experienced popularity far greater – and far sooner – than we could have imagined six months ago.

Not that it all came by accident. Our three-person editorial staff has a combined 60-plus years’ experience in marketing, editorial, public relations and web dev – and about 120-plus years as political junkies, to one degree or another.

When we posted the test version of the site to Blogger in January, I predicted the PR would be doing well to have to have around 200 daily readers within six months. Three months later, after we had moved to our permanent location at pensitoreview.com, we had already reached the hoped-for 200 daily readers (or “unique visitors” in Geekspeak). In May, our readership spiked and by month’s end, we’d had 34,903 unique visits, an average of 1,125 readers a day.

For this modest success, we are grateful. We decided to publish Pensito Review because, like you, we were hungry for real news unfiltered. Turns out, we are Legion. Who knew?

So I guess we can call this a launch.

PS. We appreciate all the comments. But what I really love is that our first flame came from the Left.