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Illinois Issues
Archive2001-Present: Scroll Down or Use Search1975-2001: Click Here

A Conversation sith the Publisher: Read about yourself: active, educated, influential

Ed Wojcicki
WUIS/Illinois Issues

You vote; nearly all of you do. You give money to political campaigns; most of you do.

Half of you have at least a master’s degree, and most of the rest of you have a bachelor’s degree.

We learned all of that in a recent survey of Illinois Issues subscribers. We are grateful to our business manager, Chris Ryan, for analyzing the results. It was our first readership survey in five years. I promised to tell you about those results, so I am summarizing them here.

I love to tell people about our readers — a distinguished group of educated, active and influential citizens.

For the first time, we asked whether you influence state policy or decision-making. More than half of you do. More of you work for an association than for any other place of employment. Many others work for state or local government, for an educational institution or for a business or corporation.

You’re also loyal to Illinois Issues. You share your magazine or save it for future reference. You recommend articles to friends and colleagues. Thank you for that. And you’re respectfully critical of us, which is what I would expect from an educated audience. All of your comments have been shared with our staff.

So thanks for your subscriptions and your responses.

Perhaps the best news for us was that our “favorables” went up between 1996 and 2001. They were strong five years ago but are stronger now. A greater percentage of subscribers rated our overall quality as excellent, and more subscribers found our coverage of the legislature in particular to be “very useful.” We could not get a better compliment than that.

Beyond conducting the readership survey, another summer project was the work of our art director Diana Nelson (no relation to our acting board chair with the same name). Diana redesigned our Web site, illinoisissues.uis.edu.

Starting this fall, we’re shifting some time spent by our projects editor, Maureen McKinney, so she can assist with Web site content. At that site, you will find more than our magazine. You also will get more background about policy topics and some updated state news. 

We’re looking for additional resources to do even more. It’s a work in progress. Our readership survey told us that more than half of you would use an information-packed Illinois policy Web site regularly. So we’ll do our best.

Meanwhile, the Web site makes it easy for you to give us feedback and suggestions. We’ll look forward to working with you.


 

Illinois Issues, September 2001

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