tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6126042.post-1099266039061430142004-11-07T23:33:00.000Z2004-12-11T14:21:25.320Z We keep being asked by well-wishers exactly who this blog is for. In fact, though, it seems to be a characteristic of the way it works that everyone who reads it feels like an eavesdropper. In a sense, it's for no-one — yet. It's like overhearing provocative fragments of conversation on a train, when you haven't the gall to peer round the corner and see who the participants are. In any sort of business context, of course, that would be a disaster. We need to know who we're targeting, don't we? We all want a brief that spells out who we're writing for, ideally with a bit of background on demographics and lifestyles as well. But here it doesn't matter. No-one's selling anybody anything. And that makes a difference. We don't need to gently flatter and coax an audience. We don't have to mind our Ps and Qs, except in the interests of sustaining our reputation for wit and literacy and fending off the attentions of our fellow-pedants. (Yes, "to gently flatter" was a split infinitive. And it was a good decision to split it, too. Do you really think "gently to flatter" or "to flatter gently" would have worked better in context? Get out of here.) Because nobody's bothered to pay much attention before to the people we call e-editors. No-one seems to have recognised that there's a large — if fragmented — community of wordworkers of one sort or another that's ill served by the artificial demarcation lines between marketing, PR, internal comms, copywriting, Web content production, technical authoring and journalism. Yet it doesn't take more than a few sums on the back of an envelope to work out that there are thousands of these jobs that depend, at least in part, on applying traditionally journalistic skills, techniques and disciplines to the production of printed or online material. The IPR (Institute of Public Relations), the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising), the CiB (British Association of Communicators in Business), the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) and the dear old NUJ all cater for some of these areas. But many of us could quite easily slot into three or four of these worthy bodies — and probably, in practice, have contact with none of them. Despite the mythology of Fleet Street, people who work with words can be an unclubbable lot, and we're not expecting to be running e-editor eisteddfods (or eisteddfodau, for the purists) any time soon. But there must be some merit in bringing together these separated tribes of wordsmiths and building a forum for their different views and perspectives. We do know we've got readers out there in the construction industry, in a couple of national charities, in software companies, mail-order catalogue houses and a few legal firms. But the direct feedback that comes in to us is so sparse that we can hardly begin to put a coherent picture together. We certainly don't know enough about our UK readers to start pandering to their prejudices, or indeed focusing on their particular interests. And we can guess even less about the overseas half of our audience, which seems, according to our traffic logs, to be an unexpected mixture of Americans and Eastern Europeans. So if you feel inclined to drop us a line at any time, with comments, criticisms or suggestions, don't hold back. After the jolting disruptions that have slowed our posting rate to a crawl over the last couple of months, we're back on track now and expecting to publish at least once every week or two. It would be good to know our droppings were not falling on deaf eaves. ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00882602151850785568noreply@blogger.com