By now, you’ve undoubtedly gone to PSP’s new Web site. Perhaps you’ve even noticed that we post a fresh news item every business day. If not, please let me bring this new service to your attention.
As people who publish—or read—monthly magazines know, “news” in such a publication isn’t very new. Even in a reasonably efficient operation such as PSP, the news we deliver is a minimum of 3 weeks old by the time it hits your eyeballs. So it’s really more of a roundup of recent news and a reminder of what you most likely have seen previously in other media.
So what’s the editor of a monthly trade magazine to do?
This is where a Web site is so valuable. We now have the capability to bring you news that’s actually new. Our objective is to post items daily that are no more than 1 day removed from their original sources, whether they be a newspaper, a press release, a blog, or even an item that PSP’s crack editorial staff has unearthed on its own.
For example, if you checked our site during the ASAPS meeting in late April, you may have noticed that we reported on important papers presented there. You can’t get much newsier than that.
And here’s where you come in. I hereby invite you to send us “hot” items that you think would be worthy of our readers’ attention. We think that we cover the plastic surgery world pretty well, but you may have access to sources that we don’t. And you may be a newsmaker yourself. So please don’t hesitate to e-mail potential news items to me, or better, to our associate editor, Rima Bedevian ([email protected]), whose job it is to Web-publish our news at lightning speed. Unless you request otherwise, you will be given credit for finding the story for us.
So what will happen to the Newsroom department in our print edition? We are in the process of transforming that into news analysis. In some cases, an item will appear first in the daily PSP Web news, and later as a more in-depth version, with commentary by knowledgeable physicians—and even us—in the following month’s issue. So don’t be surprised if we phone you to get a quote about a current news story—and, again, feel free to get in touch with us if you would like to go on record about a topic of the day.
Plastic surgery—whether reconstructive or aesthetic—is one of the most talked-about medical fields today. We, as one of the leading voices of this field, believe that it is our responsibility to disseminate plastic surgery news in an informed and responsible manner—devoid of the misinformation you might read in supermarket tabloids and the hype that’s prevalent in . . . well, you know where the hype is. But we need you to help keep us on the right path. Please keep those letter and e-mails coming.