Keeping in touch with all of you

I’m not a big talker. Part of it is just my natural ability to stumble over words at random intervals and the fact that, as my wife keeps reminding me, I just speak way too quietly. Which is funny; sure, I was a shy kid and teenager overall, but I wasn’t antisocial or reserved. I had plenty of friends and sometimes even made connections with popular students, but I wasn’t the kind of person who liked to be the center of attention in a crowd, nor was I any good at working up the courage to ask ladies out on dates.

So, I’ve never been a complete wallflower or small-talk failure, nor am I reluctant to speak my mind or interject into conversations in which I have a reason to be involved.

All of this is my long-winded way of saying that while I can speak and like to interact with people in person (I’m an introvert with occasional bursts of extroversion), the written word is where it’s at for me.

Big surprise, eh? The chief editor with more than 20 years of experience in journalism—who’s been writing fiction on the side since at least fourth grade—prefers to write than speak.

Call me Captain Obvious.

But really, there is a reason for all this rambling, other than to fill my editorial slot in this issue, and that is to talk about getting to know all of you.

At some point, I’m sure I’ll be attending the occasional industry event and seeing some of you in person, but for the most part, I get to know you in writing. Not just communicating through news articles, but in emails, my editorials here, our website and our social media outlets. We used to have a blog, but blogging is a hard area in which to gain traction, so we moved away from that.

However, it has always remained our goal to stay connected with all of you electronically; not just through emails and the website but also through social media—which makes it all the more unfortunate that for much of the early part of 2014, I was a bit quiet on our Twitter and Facebook accounts as I got comfortable sitting in the chief editor’s chair here at DDNews.

But over the past couple months, I’ve been getting back into more-or-less regular posts on both of our social media accounts. Sometimes daily, sometimes not; sometimes once a day and sometimes more often. In the end, though, it’s been pretty regular posting.

Our social media postings are mostly a chance for us to share new issues of the magazine with you and point you to daily news on our site or share things like whitepapers with you, but we do hope that at times it might also serve as a place for discussions or for you to ask questions.

That’s the social part of social media. If all we ever do is get word out to you about stories and other items you might want to know about, we’ll have done our job. But at the same time, it is the hope of this written communicator that we can actually talk online at times too, and make a connection deeper and more personal than just magazine and reader.

You can find us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DDNewsOnline (please follow us if you don’t already) and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/DDNewsOnline (please “like” this business page, which is a fairly new creation).

See you there.