On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 10:40:25PM -0700, Tony Baechler wrote:
Hi. So, should I just put something together as a draft and post it here or send it to someone in particular? The problem I had last time is that I had someone else who also wanted to do the newsletter asking me what to
Hi, Tony. Did you get a response from this? The short answer: 1. Email Michael <hart@pobox.com> to get the advance newsletter copies. Then, send any suggested changes or fixes. 2. If you have additional content, like reviews or anything else, send it to Michael. Yes, it would be nice for Michael to *not* be the main newsletter editor. To move towards that, the method he and I support is to have a transitional "parallel" newsletter... perhaps the same as the current newsletter, or perhaps substantially different. If you, or a group of people, are able to consistently produce a useful newsletter then you'll find that your newsletter is "the" newsletter. This is how we've handled such transitions in the past. Unfortunately, past newsletter editors have eventually gone onto different activities, and the job keeps falling back onto Michael (or sometimes, briefly, to me). This is why we don't just "turn over" the newsletter to people who express an interest. Instead, we try to have a gradual try-out period. I'm very sorry to hear that you didn't get the guidance or feedback or thanks you needed to be effective. I know you've been looking at the newsletter for months now, and are interested in stepping up to a higher level of activity. If all else fails, I can enable you to send your newsletter directly -- just get in touch with me directly. But to start, I would like to try what I've outlined above. If you're having trouble getting a response from Michael, include !@! in the start of the Subject line, and re-send. You can also send to me, and I'll bother him on your behalf :-) How does this sound? Best, -- Greg
do. I had to explain that I have no control over the PG lists and in fact really had no more idea of what to do than they did. George was surprised that I never got replies back in regards to questions I had asked. I think that a team effort is probably best since I do not want to take over MH's portion of the newsletter. The part I would do would probably not be very large and would hopefully mostly consist of features sent in by others. I would act as an editor, not a writer. As I understand it, we are talking about editors here, and an editor simply fixes errors in text written by others. I might write a paragraph editorial, but I am not one for verbosity in my writing.
The only other difficulty I could see is that I would probably prefer to send my portion out on Tuesday or Wednesday nights as opposed to Wednesday at noon. This means that I would have to receive submissions by Tuesday afternoon so I could fix them in time. That would be subject to change of course and would depend on how much material I would get. If I have a regular group of submitters such as someone to report on DP, someone to review a book or two and someone to comment on a particularly interesting book posted in the last week, I would definitely set my deadline for each week to Tuesday morning. If I only have something trickle in on an irregular basis, this could be extended to Tuesday at midnight or early Wednesday morning. I realize that posting the newsletter to the lists on this time schedule doesn't comply with the PG policy of posting all parts by noon on Wednesday, but the new books part is produced automatically now and I would not really be dealing with that at all, so I don't think my portion is as time-sensitive.
If this is something that Michael and Greg would like to see me go further on, I will try to put something together. I unfortunately can't manage the newsletter web archives at this time, and again I would not want to do part one or whatever part becomes MH's portion.
At 09:58 AM 5/17/2005 -0700, you wrote:
We don't have a set of rules for how an editor should write newsletters, each editor, including Alice, George, Greg, and Michael, has simply done the newsletters as they think best. You are encouraged to write in any manner you like, and to keep writing even when there are others writing, no need for only one way of doing things.
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