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Editor's Forum

I have big news: starting with our next issue -- January 1996 -- Sys Admin will be published every month.

As I told many readers at UniForum last year, becoming a monthly has always been our goal. Unfortunately, the financial reality is that it's a lot less risky to launch a six-time-a-year publication and grow it into a monthly than it is to launch a monthly. Your strong interest and the continuing support of a growing population of advertisers have combined to produce exactly the kind of growth it takes to justify converting to a monthly production schedule.

I'm excited about this change -- and I hope you are too. Being a monthly means more editorial space and the opportunity to bring even more value to the reader. When you only publish six issues, you can only tackle six editorial themes. Certainly those six have to be important topics, but in the UNIX world, there are a lot more than six important topics -- now we'll have room to give six more of those topics fair coverage.

But like every change, going monthly is a double-edged sword. We can't publish six more issues without doubling the editorial and production work-load. We'll have to make changes, sometimes easy, sometimes not so easy, to schedules and staffing. But we can handle all that.

We can't, however, just wave a magic wand and produce the extra stories it takes to fill six more issues. We need your help for that. Our stories come, mostly, from our readers. So, if you've been thinking maybe you'd like to share your experience with others, now's the time to pony up. Send in a proposal; we'll be happy to consider it.

And while I'm at it, I'd like to thank all our readers and advertisers for making Sys Admin such a big success. This magazine has been (and continues to be) fun -- because so many of you have contributed to making it useful.

Thank you,
Robert Ward