A reorganization of the LWN Weekly Edition

There are a few issues that we are trying to address at this time. One is that there is an inherent tension between the concept of a "weekly edition" and the need to publish news in a frequent and timely manner. One thing that we have clearly observed over the years is that articles we publish immediately in our daily news stream are more visible and are circulated more widely than those that we reserve for the weekly edition. So anything that runs only in the weekly edition is essentially being hidden from many of our actual and potential readers.

The edition format also tends to de-emphasize our core product: our feature content. Feature articles placed toward the rear of the edition are far less visible than those found in the front. Many readers are clearly happy to page through screens of security updates and kernel patches to get to the next feature article, but that's not the case for everybody. The need to page through content that may have already been seen in the daily stream to find the material that is new in the edition is also not helpful.

One of the objectives behind the original weekly edition design was to force ourselves to cover a wide range of topics every week. That remains as strong a goal as ever, but experience has shown that a bit more flexibility also makes sense. Different parts of our community generate news at different times; the need to fill a set of fixed "slots" can make it hard to focus on the most interesting events at any given time.

Finally, recent experience has shown that it is indeed difficult to find authors who are willing to jump onto the LWN treadmill and commit to writing articles that meet the standards that our readers expect. As a result, we still have an open position here at LWN. While our search has not yet yielded a full-time editor, it has brought some welcome additions to our set of freelance authors, as can be seen in, for example, the recent, well-received coverage from the Netdev and Cloud-Native Computing conferences. We are more than happy to have this coverage, but accommodating it will be easier with a more flexible edition format.

With those thoughts in mind we are, on an experimental basis, making some changes to how the LWN Weekly Edition is published. They include:

• Rather than build up a bunch of content and dump it all out on Thursdays, we will work to publish our work steadily over the week as it becomes ready. We will, in other words, become a bit more like most other news-oriented sites in that we'll stop delaying our content and hiding some of it in the weekly edition.
• That said, we have a lot of readers who appreciate the weekly edition and use it as their primary means of access to LWN content. So the edition is not going anywhere; it will continue to be published every Thursday, and it will continue to offer an overall view of what has happened in the Linux and free-software community over the previous week. If you only come to LWN on Thursdays, you can continue to do so and will not miss a thing.
• The layout of the edition will change, though. We will lead with our strongest product: the feature content that our authors work so hard to create every week. The feature page will be followed by a page of briefer items, many of which, as they always have, consist of pointers to interesting material elsewhere on the net. Finally, the back page will hold the announcements that we have always carried: newsletters, conferences, security updates, kernel patches, etc. We are not there yet, but the intent is for the back page to be the only weekly edition page that carries content which has not yet been seen elsewhere on the site. So readers who follow us every day will eventually be able to skip all but this page without fear of missing something new.

One important thing to note here is that LWN's content mix is not changing — we are not dropping any coverage areas. All that is changing is how that content is organized and presented.

This new format is an experiment; if it truly fails to work out, we can go back to the way things used to be. But we want to run the experiment for a while to see how it works and, undoubtedly, there will be changes to make on the way. There are also internal workflow changes that will have to be made in the coming weeks as we figure out the best way to work in the new mode. Suggestions from readers, in the form of comments to this article or direct email, will be appreciated.

(The curious may be wondering about the decline in subscribers that was reported in the August article. We are happy to say that the situation changed after the publication of that article, and subscriptions are growing again. Thanks to all of you who signed up to support LWN.)

Next January, LWN will complete its 20th year of publication. That is far longer than we ever thought we would be doing this but, at the same time, it often feels like we are just getting started. We will almost certainly be making other changes in the future, aimed at making LWN better and keeping it strong for the next 20 years. But one thing will certainly not change: we remain dedicated to creating the best writing about Linux and free software for the best reader community on the planet. Thanks to all of you for your support; that is what has kept us going for so long.