Sifting and Winnowing

The first few weeks of the Spring semester have seen significant growth in the readership of S&W — 1,200 unique visitors and almost 20,000 hits in the month of January alone, most of which occurred after the start of the semester. S&W is being followed on Twitter by most of the local media, and we know for a fact that some important media coverage of campus-related issues was prompted by our first drawing attention to those issues here. Also, we note that whenever articles have been posted on topics of widespread interest, such as new developments in the Graduate School restructuring controversy or the animal lab citations, readership has briefly surged to 2-3 times the “background” level.

So, for the moment at least, we are no longer struggling to raise our profile. The readership is there. All that is needed to sustain and further build that readership is a steady supply of content that is (a) highly relevant to our readers and (b) not available elsewhere. (more…)

For those S&W readers who missed it as well, it has just come to our attention (almost a week late) that the director of the Research Animal Resources Center, Eric Sandgren, offered his perspective on the news coverage of the recent citations in this guest editorial published on Jan. 16 by the online edition of the Wisconsin State Journal.

The original press reports were here and here.

For those seeking additional perspectives, we continue to recommend the lively (and lengthy) exchange that took place in the first week of January in the comments section of this post on the Sconz as well as these letters from the administration.

And in a late addendum to this post, we now have Todd Finkelmeyer’s (Capital Times) report, USDA returns but finds no issues with UW animal research.