Last September, the ILC communicators conducted a survey about your favourite newsletter. Who are its readers? Are they satisfied with the content? Survey answers that you are mostly scientists
What do NewsLine readers think? (Photo DESY) |
who would like more stories about physics. Unfortunately, many of you do not know how to get your stories into NewsLine yet.
How often do you read Newsline sections? (Click to find out) |
Who reads NewsLine? (Click to find out) |
What kind of NewsLine stories would you like to see more (or less)?(Click to find out) |
If you reached a milestone… would you tell us? (Click to find out) |
You actually read it
This survey is the second one since the creation of the publication two years ago at Snowmass. It was available in both English and Japanese and a total of 410 readers over the 1850 subscribers answered it. The first result is that more than 86 percent of the readers actually spend more than 5 minutes reading NewsLine every week. Moreover, about 72 percent of you are interested enough to click on "read more" links frequently or almost every time.
Just like last time, the NewsLine section that gets most attention is the Director's Corner, with more than 41 percent reading it all the time and more than 35.5 percent reading it frequently. But the features don't seem to be doing badly, either - exactly half of you read them frequently, 28 percent even read them all the time.
More scientists... and more physics stories
This publication is above all a communication tool for the ILC community, but is also aimed at the physics community in general. We are glad to count 6 percent more scientist readers than last year. The student proportion is also higher, growing from 7.2 percent to 9 percent. The ILC community is also well represented. We estimate that 530 scientists, engineers and technicians working on the ILC project are reading NewsLine. Concerning the content, you think the balance of story subjects has improved since last year (see figure 1). Last year, you asked for more accelerator stories which you find today to be just right. But there is one area where you still want more and this is (of course) the physics.
The surprise
Unfortunately, we often miss results because we were not aware that they existed. The survey asked if you would report to us if you reached a milestone, and our greatest surprise was that most of the time you said that it would not occur to you. We also learned that many of you considered your intermediate results not significant enough to be reported on. A note to those who answered that they were too shy to contact us: don't be, we're nice...
Help us improve NewsLine
ILC NewsLine is a tool for the ILC community, aimed for the particle physics community. With this publication, you have the opportunity to talk to your colleagues. So whatever news you would tell them during an ILC workshop could make an interesting NewsLine story. Did you reach a milestone? Have you got exciting data? Have you been to a successful meeting? Are you experiencing a successful working collaboration with another laboratory or country? Did you finally find solutions to your old problems? These are all things that could interest us. We interview you, we write the story, you get to check the facts before publication, and it gets published in ILC NewsLine. We hope that from now on, you will take advantage of this publication to tell your stories to the community.
The ILC communicators would like to thank all of you who took the time to fill out our questionnaire and write interesting and enlightening comments for us. We will do our best to improve the quality of this publication. Now the survey is closed, but you can send comments anytime of the year!
-- Perrine Royole-Degieux |
