If you’ve been to our site before, you’ll notice it’s undergone change. Quite a lot, in fact. Here’s a guide to what you’ll find here.
On our previous site, we posted on Monday morning in text format some of the pieces appearing in the new issue, which is to say the issue we had sent to the printer over the weekend and was hitting the newsstands that day. In this way we made available to anyone with a modem and a browser a portion of each new edition. With the new site, we’ll continue to post pieces in text format from the latest issue, as you can see by clicking on The Weekly Standard in the nav bar. We’ll decide from week to week how much of a given issue we’ll publish in this section of the site.
With the launch of the new site, we decided to publish all of the articles from our last four issues. Also on our previous site, we posted on certain occasions—during the quadrennial political conventions, most notably—just-for-the-web reports and commentary on the day’s news. But those occasions were few.
Today, if you click on The Daily Standard— always accessible to any reader—you’ll see that we’re writing pieces for the web and posting them daily (actually, every weekday). That’s a major change for us. But it’s not so big that it will significantly alter what we do here. And what we do is put out a weekly magazine on politics and culture, one printed on coated stock cut to standard size and then bound and mailed to subscribers. We hope that The Daily Standard will attract to our site readers who don’t already know our magazine and compel them to recognize that The Weekly Standard is a must-have magazine. If just now you have reached this conclusion, by the way, I’d encourage you to click on Subscribe in the nav bar or wherever else you encounter it—for your convenience we’ve populated the site with opportunities to subscribe—and take advantage of our special web offer.
For our subscribers, we’re doing something for you only—something that as magazines go is unusual. After we send each new issue to the printer late on Friday, we will put it into an easily downloadable format (Adobe PDF) and place it on the site. Subscribers may open the issue, which page for page will be an exact replica of the print magazine, simply by registering for access (a painless process that requires merely choosing a password). We expect that some subscribers will boot up their computers and with a few keystrokes be reading The Weekly Standard on Saturday—well before their copies arrive in the mail. We’re also putting back issues of the magazine in Adobe PDF and collecting them in a subscribers-only library.
As I write this, we have formatted all of the 1999, 2000, and 2001 issues and loaded them onto the site. Eventually—by the end of this year is the plan—every one of the issues going back to our very first one (dated September 17, 1995) will be formatted and included in our virtual library. This library will be searchable by issue number and date, and keyword. For subscribers and non-subscribers alike, we’ve also established a searchable archive of all that we publish in The Daily Standard and in text format from The Weekly Standard.
I should emphasize that we’ve expanded and improved our subscriber services area. Our hope is that subscribers will use weeklystandard.com and its new interactive capabilities to transact business—i.e., to renew subscriptions, pay for orders, change address, register complaints (late or missing issues), and so forth. That, in brief, is the new site. It’s heavy on what students of the web call “content,” which is to say on sentences and therefore on thought. This being the web, of course, we don’t just talk to you. You can talk to us, by email. Please do so.
