Chainlinks news: some changes and the timing for the next issue

There have been some changes in the team that puts together CAN's "Chainlinks" magazine. The role of main editor has been taken on by Stephen Wood, who up until now has had the role of contributions manager. Claire Pascoe has agreed to take on the role of contributions manager, but as she has a busy month in February on other things, will work up to it slowly.

Miriam Richardson, who has been the Chainlinks editor for a few years, is not leaving the Chainlinks team. She will still do the work to lay out the material and produce final copy to go to the printers. In effect, we've split the job that she did before into a part that she will keep doing and a part that Stephen will take over. 

We're making use of some copy-editors to give articles a bit of a makeover, and proofreaders checking the final copy. CAN's committee also gives the issue the "once-over" before it is sent to the printers, just in case we've said something they don't think CAN should be saying.

We had an "interesting" job putting together the December 2009 issue because we wanted to work around the big events in the middle of November, the 7th NZ Cycling Conference and CAN's annual AGM, get together and workshop, the "CAN Do", both held in New Plymouth. So we tried to do some of the preparation before those events, and then finish off reports from them afterwards and get the issue out before Christmas. We did achieve that, but realise it was tight and that some local groups didn't manage to distribute copies out to their members until the new year. 

We have a similar sort of divided schedule for the first issue we prepare for 2010. We decided it would be too much of a rush to get the issue out before the Bike Wise campaign, which runs all of February. So we're planing on getting the issue out in a way that can include reports of how Bikewise has gone in your area.

What we're going to do is to get started on preparation of the issue during early Feruary. We've set a submission date of February 12 for articles that are not directly liked to Bike Wise,  only two weeks from the date I'm writing this. There's nothing to stop you submitting before them. We'll then get going on deciding which of these to include and work on editing and preparing them.

Near the end of the February, we'll have a another cutoff date of February 27 for articles that are reports of Bike Wise activities and of local group activities. Because we'll have left a certain amount of space for these articles, they will be edited to fit the space we have. We'll finish off the layout early in March, get it to the printers and you should get your copy before the end of March. 

These deadlines were signalled in the December issue of Chainlinks - on page 2. 

As well as articles from members, there will also be news from CAN's new committee. They've been working on setting some new directions for CAN, and taking the first steps on the  proposed restucturing that ws put forward at the CAN DO.