Doing what I can to drive traffic
Last year, the American Nuclear Society launched a blog. I immediately became uninvolved. I'm not looking to do more work than that with which I'm already loaded down, and nobody has offered to give me a really steep raise, so I continued trying to meet the deadlines I already have at Nuclear News, the Society's stodgy old monthly. A while back I was on the phone with a blogger who devotes himself to nuclear issues, and he gushed about the possibilities of new media and social networking. I replied, "None of that works for me, because I'm old media and anti-social."
The blog folks at ANS HQ made some overtures, however, and my editor would like to see the blog succeed, so we worked out a deal, at least for the time being. Nuclear News carries advertising and has a controlled circulation (free to members of the society, pricey to anyone else), so if I start writing hot news for the blog, it undercuts the content of the magazine (given the production lead-times of something printed on paper) and amounts to giving away the store. (Why pay for an ANS membership when you can get Nuclear News content for free on a blog?)
What I'd write for the blog, therefore, would be things I wouldn't write (usually) in the mag: news analysis and humor. We also agreed that I would do this writing at my convenience, during gaps between deadlines, and I would charge the time to the blog's account, so at least Nuclear News can reduce its expenditures a bit.
The first piece, a properly sobersided news analysis, was posted on January 17. It's good, and for those of you not hip to the field, it could be informative. If you're interested, click on this link:
http://ansnuclearcafe.org/
You'll have to scroll down quite a ways; this blog posts one or more items a day. My debut is titled "Public opinion has changed. So has nuclear power." Whatever your views on the subject, please note that what I've written is analysis, not advocacy.
Anyway, we're coming up on post time (to drag a term from horse racing to the internet) for the next item, and I confess that I can't wait to see how it's received. Nuclear News is one of those rare publications about heavy industry that has a humor page, and for more than 40 years it's been written almost every issue by Bill Minkler, a now-retired engineer from Pennsylvania. While he's amazingly productive, however, even Bill has missed an issue once in a while, and from time to time over the past 30 years I've filled in, under the pseudonym of "A. Priori."
On Wednesday, A. Priori makes his debut on the blog.
If any of you wants to contribute to making this viral, I'm all for it.
I'll just tease the title:
"Schroedinger's groundhog."
The blog folks at ANS HQ made some overtures, however, and my editor would like to see the blog succeed, so we worked out a deal, at least for the time being. Nuclear News carries advertising and has a controlled circulation (free to members of the society, pricey to anyone else), so if I start writing hot news for the blog, it undercuts the content of the magazine (given the production lead-times of something printed on paper) and amounts to giving away the store. (Why pay for an ANS membership when you can get Nuclear News content for free on a blog?)
What I'd write for the blog, therefore, would be things I wouldn't write (usually) in the mag: news analysis and humor. We also agreed that I would do this writing at my convenience, during gaps between deadlines, and I would charge the time to the blog's account, so at least Nuclear News can reduce its expenditures a bit.
The first piece, a properly sobersided news analysis, was posted on January 17. It's good, and for those of you not hip to the field, it could be informative. If you're interested, click on this link:
http://ansnuclearcafe.org/
You'll have to scroll down quite a ways; this blog posts one or more items a day. My debut is titled "Public opinion has changed. So has nuclear power." Whatever your views on the subject, please note that what I've written is analysis, not advocacy.
Anyway, we're coming up on post time (to drag a term from horse racing to the internet) for the next item, and I confess that I can't wait to see how it's received. Nuclear News is one of those rare publications about heavy industry that has a humor page, and for more than 40 years it's been written almost every issue by Bill Minkler, a now-retired engineer from Pennsylvania. While he's amazingly productive, however, even Bill has missed an issue once in a while, and from time to time over the past 30 years I've filled in, under the pseudonym of "A. Priori."
On Wednesday, A. Priori makes his debut on the blog.
If any of you wants to contribute to making this viral, I'm all for it.
I'll just tease the title:
"Schroedinger's groundhog."