Recruiting for the newsletter

As you may have noticed on several occasions, the moment that something comes up in real life, the publication date of the newsletter suffers. This is mainly because of the small staff working on the newsletter. Silent Hunter is an essential part of the newsletter in providing excellent background stories on a regular base and he checks the stories that I have written to make sure there aren't any errors in them. He also managed to turn in the GC's comment on time every time, but now that he no longer is the GC and since Jason Andersen is still absent, things have become a bit chaotic there, although Misty has done a wonderful job in stepping in.

As for the news stories: I almost exclusively write those. I also put everything together and publish the whole as a pdf. I am not trying to brag here. Far from it: most of my work isn't very hard at all. It is however, rather time consuming, which explains why the newsletter suffers the moment that I'm short on time.

The solution to this problem is simple: we need a bigger staff for the newsletter. What we need is an assistant/backup/alternate editor-in-chief who can do (part of) the work I normally do for the newsletter: writing news articles and putting things together. A second editor-in-chief would also be able to check on the stories I've written and vice versa to eliminate any errors in the stories.

To put things together I use Microsoft Publisher and I have made a template for making the newsletter. Anybody who would be interested in stepping up as second editor-in-chief would either need to have Microsoft Publisher, or another similar program that can work with Publisher files.

Apart from a second editor-in-chief I would also like people in general who are interested in writing a background story, be it on a regular base or as a one-time thing, to contact me: we can always use background stories. The same goes for artists: we've had several episodes of 'The Artist's Corner' in our newsletter and I think it's a great way for people to see what some of our Phoenix members have managed to produce. If your work hasn't been published yet and if you have some work that you want to share, whether it's Phoenix related or not, please contact me.

I would really like everyone to consider helping with the newsletter. It is very fun to do and I do believe it is a valuable addition to our activities. But it needs to be a reliable news source, which means that it needs to be published on a regular base and I cannot keep that up without help.

-Mischa, editor-in-chief of The Burning Question