Reconciling Mission and Budget for an IT Newsletter Copyright 1993 CAUSE. From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 1993. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: jrudy@CAUSE.colorado.edu RECONCILING MISSION AND BUDGET FOR AN IT NEWSLETTER by Ivars Balkits ABSTRACT: At the University of California, Davis, a minor feat of reengineering resulted in substantial savings in the publication of the Information Technology division's newsletter. A cost-driven decision to go to newsprint had other positive side effects, as well. Earlier this year, the newsletter editor at a university computing center in Michigan sent a query to CCNEWS, the electronic forum for campus computing newsletter editors. Evidently, the budget crunch in that state had forced the retirement of the "traditional" (paper) form of the computing newsletter, and she was tapping CCNEWS for ideas on alternative means of information dissemination--especially those involving online solutions. As were other CCNEWS subscribers, I was disheartened by the demise of this excellent publication--that had been thoroughly informative, eminently readable, and well-designed--and so I resisted offering solutions that might take the newsletter out of circulation. Instead, I proposed an alternative that has worked well in reconciling budget and mission for the Information Technology division at the University of California, Davis. Our low-tech solution for IT Times, the newsletter for information technology at UCD, was simply to go to newsprint--a minor feat of reengineering that embodied, at least partially, the rationale that eventually led to our current publications and public relations strategy. That is to say, newsprint suggests newspaper; which suggests news, not technical articles; which suggests a broader audience; which suggests a wider circulation; which suggests changes in editorial policy; and so on. Along with the 60-pound felt-weave covers and 50-pound bond interior pages, our group dropped the technical-magazine format of the old publication in favor of a tabloid-style newspaper. Instead of a 40-page (average) quarterly with about 2,500 circulation, we now produce an 8-page1 bimonthly insert to the campus staff newspaper, with a circulation of nearly 12,500. We also continue to distribute about 500 copies through our help desk and labs. Lower printing costs Our printing costs are substantially lower now--even though we incorporate more graphical content and even photographs with our copy. Printing for the final year of the old publication, Turn-Around Times, tallied as follows: Fall 91 $1,676 Winter 92 $1,676 Spring 92 $1,179 Summer 92 $1,100 Costs to date for the newsletter IT Times have tabulated as follows: Volume 1 Number 1 (12,500) $711 Volume 1 Number 2 (13,000) $546 Volume 1 Number 3 (13,000) $1,081 Volume 1 Number 4 (13,000) $593 Volume 1 Number 5 (13,000) $144 Issue 5 clearly registers much lower. With that issue, the staff newspaper and, by default, our insert, contracted with another printing company. Also, we began grouping our photographs for reduction and gang-shooting into halftones and pasting those halftones in ourselves. The campus printer charges $65 per hour for those services. Another cost our budget has not had to bear is the $200 per issue for bulk mailing that we paid when we published alone. The staff newsletter has not sent us a bill--evidently because the increased volume of production has garnered them discounts from the printer, or ... ? In any case, even with the anomalies adjusted, it is apparent that the savings have been substantial. Editorial policy changes Another important change from the old newsletter is that the editorial policy of IT Times does not allow for technical articles. The necessity of keeping to a fixed and much lower page-count has forced that decision to an extent. More importantly, however, the broader-based audience and increased circulation have dictated a more non-technical approach. For UCD Information Technology services in general, the average technical sophistication of the clientele has gone down--because more non-technical users are using those services. As one consultant recently put it: "'E-mail, e-mail, e-mail!' we've been saying, and now everyone's listened at once!" Not only did we ban the more esoteric shop talk, however, we also did away with how-to articles for the novice and the software reviews. Put simply, we could not spare the white space for those needs and turned (and continue to turn) to online solutions to meet them. Much technical information is now disseminated electronically through Gopher servers on the UCD campus-wide information system. Through this means also, we make back issues of the IT Times available, as well as hard news that cannot wait until the newsletter comes out. Instead, our focus for the newsletter has been on client services topics. Articles have been about such issues as changes in client support; changes in campus policy that affect access to networked services; new strategies for automating administrative processes; new alliances among faculty and IT staff for administering site licenses; new technology-based methods for easing the teaching workload; and so forth. Most recently, based on feedback from readers as well as IT staff, IT Times editorial strategy has taken another major turn for the better (in my opinion). By means of case studies, scenarios, interviews, and similar devices, feature articles and shorter items now are written as much as possible from the end user's perspective with regard to the services IT provides or hopes to provide. Examples include: * instead of "foregrounding" our progress in bringing the student information system online, we now place the emphasis on its active use by a computer resource specialist in the financial aid office; * to report on the status of the campus fiber backbone project, we feature scenarios of a completed and comprehensive high-speed network from the working-day perspectives of hypothetical campus clients in the not-too-distant future; or * in announcing the automated phone attendant at the IT help desk, we write about another department's experience with its automated attendant. Whether it can be proved that going to newsprint determined it, the rationale for this new policy twist is thus: To write of issues of direct concern to our readership, IT Times must take a "you" instead of "us" attitude and never appear self-serving or introverted, but serve the reader's interest in providing thought-provoking, readable, and informative content. Our newsletter probably will evolve to become an online publication primarily. And I'm looking forward to it. At the UCD Information Technology division, however, we are staying with paper a while longer. Until the network infrastructure is complete and until the sophistication of our client base increases, I do not think we can reach the people we need to reach if we eliminate the paper publication. ======================================================================== Footnote: 1 That's eight pages at 17" x 11-1/2" equal to approximately sixteen pages of the 8-1/2" X 11" magazine format. ======================================================================== Ivars Balkits is head of the Publications and Public Relations unit of Information Technology at the University of California, Davis, and the editor of IT Times, the UC Davis newsletter for information technology. ************************************************************************