First of all, my thanks again to my colleagues at the blog and to the Executive Board of S-USIH for nominating and approving me for this three-year stint as Editor. And a special thanks to outgoing editor Ben Alpers – the first USIH blogger to whom I confided that “LD” was a “she” – for his years of leadership and friendship, online and offline.
Today I’d like to announce my first official act as Editor: the appointment of two Assistant Editors who will work with me over the next three years to enrich and expand our online publication’s offerings and reach, as well as to encourage new contributors to join our roster of writers.
My colleagues Sara Georgini and Andrew Seal have kindly agreed to serve as Assistant Editors of the S-USIH blog. Sara will be managing our social media presence and will help coordinate collaborative publication events with other academic blogs in our field. Andy will undertake the coordination and scheduling of thematic roundtables and will supervise the rollout of some special features we will be bringing to our readers over the next few months. Most importantly, they have agreed to offer their insight and advice regarding editorial decisions large and small.
The first task I am asking them to assist me with is the creation of a reader survey. While our bloggers frequently receive feedback via email, via face-to-face comments, and in comment threads online, as far as I know,we have never sought broad input from our readers in any comprehensive or systematic way. So we will be putting together a survey that will help us understand what you think we are doing well and what you think we could do better. We will construct the survey in a way that allows for anonymous responses, and we will then aggregate the results and share them with our members and readers.
We hope to roll out this survey soon after January 1 (maybe during or right after the AHA).
In the meantime, if you have suggestions, questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to share them here in the comments or via email. If you don’t care to contact me for whatever reason, either Sara or Andy would be glad to hear from you and pass along your input.
Thanks as always for reading and for participating in this extraordinary online community.
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