Some news from LWN
It has been some time since our last update on the state of LWN itself. That's somewhat by design, as we'd rather be writing about the community and the code than ourselves. Occasionally, though, we do like to update our readers and subscribers on the state of the operation, especially when there is some news to report, as is the case now.
We'll start with the sad (for LWN and its readers) news: Nathan Willis, who has been an LWN contributor for many years and an employee since 2012, will be stepping down at the end of September to pursue an unmissable opportunity to study one of his non-journalistic passions: fonts and type design. We will miss him, but we believe strongly in following our own paths in life and wish him well.
Nate will continue to contribute articles to LWN. But we suspect that the intricacies of Béziers, brush strokes, and kerning are going to take a lot of time and attention, meaning that we will be needing somebody to help fill his shoes. Thus, LWN is hiring. If you would like to write full-time for one of the most discriminating readerships in the world — but also one of the most interesting, engaged, and supportive readerships — we would like to hear from you. This is your chance to make your mark on one of the community's oldest publications.
Speaking of "oldest," the basic format of LWN's Weekly Edition has changed little over the last 18 years. Some pages have come and gone (long-time readers will remember the desktop page, or the once-interesting "Linux in the News" page), but substantive changes have been few indeed. That format has served us well over the years; among other things, it helps us to ensure that each edition covers a wide range of topics. But it can also be somewhat limiting; it is a sort of treadmill of slots to be filled each week that makes it hard to focus on specific areas in response to what is happening in the community.
In an attempt to address those issues, and also partially driven by the prospect of being editorially understaffed for a while, we may start to experiment a bit with the format of the edition. There will be no radical or abrupt changes, but you may see us trying out some ideas from one week to the next. As always, we will welcome feedback or suggestions for changes that readers think should be made.
LWN is, of course, a subscription-supported operation. Growth in the number of subscribers is thus critical to the growth of LWN as a whole. Unfortunately, that growth has not been happening for a few years; in the last year we have, in fact, seen a slight decline. Our financial situation is secure for now, but we would like to see subscriptions grow, which would help provide even more security as well as more resources to expand what we do. So we would like to ask our readers: if you are reading this without a subscription, please consider how LWN is created and whether it is worth supporting. If you routinely provide subscriber links to friends, please consider encouraging them to subscribe. If you work in a company with an interest in Linux, consider asking your employer to get a group subscription for everybody there.
Along the same lines, advertising revenue, which was never a huge part of LWN's income, has shrunk in recent years; this is not unique to LWN, as the whole industry is complaining about the problem. We have never felt particularly good about advertising in the first place; it is an industry with more than its share of privacy problems, and the ads we get are often not appropriate to LWN's readers. We would like to drop ads altogether, but can't quite afford to do that. If, however, subscriptions were to return to a growth path sufficient to replace the revenue we would lose, we would happily consider leaving advertisements behind. There is no doubt that LWN would be better without them.
In summary, LWN looks to be heading into a period of moderate change. One thing
that will not change, though, is our commitment to producing the
highest-quality coverage of the Linux and free software community available
anywhere. With your support, we'll be at this for a long time yet.