Changes to The Signpost
This week's issue of The Signpost is the eleventh and final publication that I will have the pleasure of editing; I am soon to start at the University of Oxford to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, with its many new demands upon my time. It is therefore a useful juncture to update you, our readers, on how The Signpost has been evolving.
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Building on from the work of HaeB, The Signpost is looking to move beyond its core purpose as an informative news provider. I think we have largely cracked that nut – at least for news of interest to English Wikipedians – and I hope that you, our hundreds of readers, would agree with me on that. We cannot, however, rest on our laurels and during my short editorship I have been all too aware that we have no more readers now than we did two years ago.
My personal hypothesis is that while The Signpost is good at informing, it has struggled at times to entertain. For this reason I have used my editorship to support the reintroduction of the Opinion Desk, which I hope will provide a steady stream of interesting Op-Eds for you to enjoy (no opinion essay is included in this issue merely to keep the number of reports at a manageable level). If you feel strongly about an issue that you think deserves greater coverage, I invite you to contribute to that column. As for breaking it in, well, we've trialled a controversial narrative, a largely uncontroversial call-to-arms, and a humorous poem. All three I hope you will have found both entertaining and in some sense provocative.
Previous editors HaeB and Ragesoss commented on a need to remain independent and to "constructively criticise" the Foundation's actions where necessary. Although I have been unable to find a breakthrough in realising this vision more effectively, I have been able to start work on a common editorial policy that communicates this and the many other components of the broader Signpost vision to all new Signpost editors. In addition, I hope that it will also be able to describe current best practice when dealing with controversial areas, such as those where the Foundation and a local community are in conflict. I therefore welcome all your thoughts on what you think The Signpost does well, and what you think it could be doing better, in the comments section of this article. The plan is to agree on the content of the new document within the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that.
In the meantime, I'm passing the baton on to a combined editorship, comprising User:SMasters and User:Skomorokh. Each future issue will be managed and directed by one of these two volunteers, whom I wish all the best.
Thank you for your continued support,
User:Jarry1250 (outgoing editor-in-chief)
Discuss this story
Jarry, thanks for your work. Good luck with your studies.
I do want to express my concern about running editorials. I think the Signpost is strongest when reporting all sides of a story while remaining neutral. At its heart, the Signpost should be a community newspaper, and I think editorials, which explore only one view of a situation, don't jibe with that. While it was well-written, I don't feel Beeblebrox's recent op-ed was appropriate for the Signpost, because at its heart, it was one person's opinion on a controversial topic.
I don't subscribe to the belief that the Signpost's role should be to entertain other than to provide well-written articles. Perhaps the best way to do that is to go back to writing more articles about controversial topics, in the vein of the great Michael Snow articles of days past. My favorite article I ever wrote was this one, which covered a very touchy subject. But there are many more examples of good, short-to-medium length content that might make the Signpost more relevant.
I know how difficult it is to get writers of longer content; this was something I struggled with for my entire tenure (and was one of the factors that led to my retirement). But I think it really does improve the content dramatically. Ral315 (talk) 23:27, 19 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]