[Editors] MIT Editors' Club Minutes, 2/25/04

[Elizabeth Thomson]

MIT EDITORS' CLUB

*Meeting Notes from February 25, 2004*

A big welcome to three new members of Editors' Club, all of whom 
attended this meeting. They are Heather Denny, communications 
coordinator for the Libraries; Scott Turner, director of 
communications for the Broad Institute, and Michelle Nhuch of the 
Broad Institute's Office of Communications.

*Finding Freelance Writers and More*

Earlier this week Scott asked me how to find good freelance writers. 
At the time I suggested sending a query to New England Science 
Writers, then it occurred to me right before this meeting that I'd 
forgotten the obvious: call MIT's Publishing Services Bureau.

Fortunately, Bara Blender of the PSB attended this meeting, so I 
immediately put her on the spot: "Tell us about the PSB!"  Bara 
explained that the PSB is a consulting office free to the MIT 
community that helps connect MIT folks to a variety of vendors, 
including graphic designers and freelance writers. One important 
benefit: often the PSB gets lower prices from their vendors than you 
or I could get by approaching vendors directly. Go to the following 
URL for more info: http://web.mit.edu/psb/

*Online/Interactive Newsletters*

Jean Foster of Academic Computing asked an interesting question: how 
many of us produce online newsletters? Send me a note if *you* do, 
and I'll compile the results and share with everyone else.

Anyway, Jean was asking because she's planning to turn The Insider, 
the newsletter out of her area, into an online newsletter and she 
wondered about others' experiences. Fortunately Scott Campbell was at 
the meeting, and was able to tell us a bit about the online 
newsletters he produces for the Center for Transportation and 
Logistics and for the School of Architecture and Planning.

For the CTL, he simply sends out e-mail notices letting readers know 
about a given story that's just gone up on the web. He includes the 
URL, for those who want to read the full story. I personally find his 
"alerts" quite interesting; he only sends out stories that he 
believes "would be of wide enough interest." His other newsletter, 
Plan, for the School of Architecture, is a GLOSSY brochure-like 
document in its print form that, again, includes the URLs for the 
full stories. Send a note to Scott if you'd like more info on either 
of these publications; he's at scottc at MIT.EDU

But back to Jean, who brought up a second related topic. She is 
thinking about adding a "blog" to the online Insider. "What's a 
BLOG?" whined several of us. Essentially it's a form attached to a 
story so that people can send in their opinions or otherwise chat 
about the topic at hand. "It's designed for people who like to 
expound---publicly," Jean said. Blogs can also be great "for getting 
a discussion going." Jean further explained that you can get free, 
open "blog" software that  you can install on your server....

* SPAM SPAM Go Away!*

The ongoing battle over SPAM came up yet again, and yet again Susan 
Curran of Web Services kindly reminded us that there *is* a way to 
(partially) control it.

Spam Assassin is a service available at  
http://web.mit.edu/is/services/email/nospam/index.html. Essentially 
it deposits suspected spam in a separate e-mail box that you can then 
review every day to make sure something "good" didn't get picked up 
as well.

A tip from me: I *thought* I'd already been using Spam Assassin, and 
wasn't that impressed because I was still getting a lot of junk mail. 
It turns out, however, that I was using just one tiny aspect of the 
program. I finally got the entire program working (thanks to the web 
site above), and have been VERY happy with the results. It catches 
about 75 spam messages a day. Yay!


*Next Meetings*

The next meetings of MIT Editors' Club are as follows. All are in the 
News Office, 11-400, from 12-1.

Wednesday, March 10

Tuesday, April 20

Monday, May 10

Tuesday, June 15.

Cheers!

Elizabeth


===================================
Elizabeth A. Thomson
Assistant Director, Science & Engineering News
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
News Office, Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307
617-258-5402 (ph); 617-258-8762 (fax)
<thomson at mit.edu>

<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www>
===================================
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/editors/attachments/20040226/61d84448/attachment.htm