Editor's page (September 2007)
Vince Aversano, Editor in Chief
The Rotarian
F
or the more than 16,000 Rotarians who attended the 98th annual RI Convention, pages 49-51 will bring back fond memories of your trip to Salt Lake City. For everyone else, we hope the words and pictures in The Rotarian will give you a small taste of the spirit, fellowship, and excitement experienced by the attendees in June. And hopefully they’ll entice you to register for the next convention in Los Angeles.
Though we’ve increased our pre-event coverage of conventions in The Rotarian, it’s been a conscious decision to reduce the amount of postevent news. Why? Given the magazine’s deadlines, we’re unable to get our coverage in print until two months after the convention. We hope to better use our pages for in-depth articles. But, more important, we hope you’re already tracking the extensive daily coverage of Rotary events at www.rotary.org.
This year, using the full resources of RI’s Communications Division, our Web site had 25 articles, six photo essays, and two videos during the five days of convention coverage. Same-day reporting on plenary sessions and workshops, as well as interviews with Rotarians, highlighted our editorial content. We received more visits to our Web site during the convention than any other week of the year, so we know that some of you did take advantage of it. But for those who missed the online news as it unfolded, it’s all packaged together now.
And that’s just the beginning. We’ll continue to provide more immediate coverage of RI events – conventions, assemblies, presidential visits – to keep you informed. We’re hoping the RI Web site will become your daily source for news and information about Rotary.
In the near future, there will be more articles, more photos, more videos – all delivered to you on a
timely basis. Additionally, you’ll be encouraged to comment on all our news stories in real time. We’ll also be opening our photo library to allow Rotarians immediate access to thousands of images shot by our staff photographers.
Next month, RI will debut a redesigned Web site, and I’m hoping you’ll make it a habit to visit www.rotary.org every day. Think of the site as your daily Rotary newspaper to complement our monthly magazine.