How You Can Guide MOTHER EARTH NEWS

A couple of years ago, we told you about our Editorial Advisory Group and invited you to join. These days, nearly 30,000 of you are taking our online surveys — choosing the most appealing cover images, rating your interest in article topics, ranking your favorite departments in the magazine, and more. The surveys create a stronger connection between MOTHER EARTH NEWS and its audience, which gives you a better magazine with more of what you want. Frankly, we think MOTHER EARTH NEWS has better interaction with our readers than any other magazine out there.

The surveys have been so helpful that now, before we assign an article, we include the topic in a survey, asking members of the Advisory Group to rate their interest in it. If the topic gets a good score, we schedule an article to cover it. If the topic gets a poor score, we move on and choose another idea that a larger number of readers are interested in.

As you may already know, we use the surveys for more than just choosing articles and cover images: We look to them to help us understand your online habits in order to make our website better. We use them to collect your firsthand experiences and create articles from that information, such as The Best Tomatoes to Grow Where You Live (February/March 2010) and a report coming up in our next issue on the worst regional garden pests. The survey system lets you tell us which region or state you live in so that we can sort all of the answers we receive, creating region-specific advice about gardening, homesteading and wiser living in general.

We’ve also set up special-interest survey groups so we can communicate with those of you who have specialized expertise. So far, we have subgroups for gardening and poultry.

For 2011, we have several exciting projects in the works, and we’ll use input from the surveys to guide us on many of them. Here are some examples:

  • Published on Mar 30, 2011
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