23 June 2016
The Shaw Sheet Party
Where we are going.
by the Shaw Sheet team
Last Thursday evening, in an Islington garden, staff and readers of the Shaw Sheet met to celebrate its first year of publication. We were a little late, of course. The fact that we are now at issue 59 indicates that, but a garden in June is warmer than one at the end of April so mid June it was. Anniversaries are an occasion for review as well as for celebration so now is the time to pause for a moment and reflect on where the Shaw Sheet has got to and where it should go next. To do that we need to remember why we set it up originally and why the production team, originally seven but now nine, spends a lot of time bringing out a weekly edition.
The starting point is a change in the press. The availability of online news has put pressure on the circulation, and thus the income, of British newspapers. To save money they have had to cut their reporting teams and they now have less resource available to research stories than used to be the case. Put that together with the ever increasing length of public reports and you will see why they tend to rely on summaries and press releases. Who, after all, is going to be able to read the Chilcott report which, when it is released next month, will weigh in at 2.6 million words coupled with a price-tag of over £700 for a hardcopy?
The drop in the level of research seemed to create an opportunity for blogs and online magazines. Of course, something as small as the Shaw Sheet has hardly any research capacity at all. On the other hand, by using authors who are experienced in particular areas, we try to get to the truth behind the scene by a slightly different route. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we don’t, but we do try to take as a guideline that most articles should “reveal” something to their readers which they had not previously appreciated. Sometimes the revelation is of fact; sometimes it is an idea; sometimes it is a juxtaposition. The idea is, however, that readers should be able to go to dinner parties feeling just a little better informed than their friends.
After a year, we have a team of nine people who regularly contribute to the issues, whether as writers or technicians or crossword compilers. We have also had some excellent external contributions. There are readers too, although not as many of them as we would like. As far as one can judge from the analytics, our articles do get picked up on searches but, in a crowded media, they do not reach as far as we would like. Over the next month or so we will be running some trials on twitter and making a deliberate effort to push our articles to people who we think would be interested in them. Hopefully that will accelerate our growth and, if we can do that, we can bring more people in, raise the standard of the publication and possibly meet some of our costs through advertising. There will be other initiatives too, an exercise on the use of keywords, a possible redesign of the cover sheet. But if you, dear reader, would like to give us a birthday present, please could you, when you see an article which you think would interest a friend, forward it to them (there is an e-mail share button at the top of each article) and encourage them to become a regular reader.
Finally, a message to those who could not make the celebration. Thank you for your support. Without our readers we are nothing. We can only hope that you have derived as much fun from reading the Shaw Sheet as we have from producing it.
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