Cogs can think.

Regarding OSNews… I became the managing editor (whatever the hell that means) of OSNews in June of 2005, so it’s been three years already. During those three years, I’ve published stories on a nearly daily basis, with only a few breaks here and there because I was away for the weekend or too busy with life beyond my laptop’s lid. I have my priorities straight, you know.

We also introduced some massive, massive changes. We released a completely new version of OSNews, with a completely overhauled website both internally and externally, and it took us a few graphical revisions to get it right - and I believe we are on the right track there. As far as looks go, I find the ‘new’ OSNews to be highly pleasing, comfortable on the eyes, readable, and free from clutter. Great work by mostly Adam, mystery designer Britney, and OSNews reader Kroc.

In addition to that, I personally made some hefty changes to our editorial policy. Most importantly, I introduced something we merely refer to as ‘new style’ items: items with more background information, more details, some context, and an opinion or two. Despite cold feet here and there concerning our readership’s response, they seem mostly positive. I’m quite happy with how that turned out.

A partially successful addition was Focus Shift, the OSNews comic. Quite a few people genuinely liked the comics I drew, but as was to be expected, quite a few hated them too. As some may have noticed by now, Focus Shift is no more - I liked doing it, but I simply lacked the time, and when it comes down to it, I obviously find OSNews itself more important than a comic. So, yeah, we shifted our focus away from Focus Shift (I owe you a punch in my face for that lame joke).

That’s all in the past now, so on to the future.

I have a certain vision in my head for how our editorial staff should function. I want to move away from the situation where OSNews was effectively Eugenia’s or my own weblog, and have a larger editorial staff where each member has his or her own speciality and areas of interest, so that we can offer more detailed and accurate stories. This will also allow for a more diverse stream of opinions coming from OSNews, which is something I’ve been really struggling with. Doing OSNews all by myself is doable at a glorified-RSS-feed-level, but with the new style items, my personal opinion just gets a little too obvious simply because there’s no counterweight. I want to combat that, and hence our quest to find more editors.

So, that’s how I envision OSNews’ future: multiple editors writing more detailed items about their personal areas of interest. Yes, that sounds a lot like Ars Technica. That’s because Ars Technica is a really, really good website. However, Ars has an entirely different focus than we do, and I believe that OSNews has a lot more opportunity to grow as sort of the “Ars of the OS world” than it has as the “glorified RSS feed of the OS world”.

However, we’ll obviously need everyone’s help to get there. If you believe you would be a welcome addition to the staff, let us know by sending an email to OSNews’ owner David Adams, or, when submitting a news item, try to write a bit more, give some background, make it a few paragraphs longer with links back to other relevant OSNews publications.

But most importantly, bear with us. Running a website about a field with so many personal opinions and conflicting interests is very, very difficult, and more than once have I failed to balance properly on the tight rope. Having more editors will certainly diminish my personal reflection on the news that gets posted on OSNews, and that’s a good thing for all of us.

Thanks for commenting on and reading OSNews.