Here’s what your reader drive donations pay for

When you donate to our reader drive, much of your gift helps pay our Staff Editor, Jonathan Neeley. You see articles every day from a wide range of contributors, and each time, Jonathan is working hard behind the scenes.

Jonathan’s work may be less visible, but it is vitally important to keeping Greater Greater Washington running and maintaining the high quality we all expect. Without him, this site wouldn’t be able to operate. Since we’re asking you to give money to keep him employed, we thought it would help to hear a little more about what he does. — David Alpert

My job is to run the blog, which means my immediate concern is always making sure we have enough content. Each morning, I check the posts I anticipate running for typos and give final consideration to the messages we’re sending in the headlines, lede paragraphs, and accompanying tweets. Then I schedule them to publish throughout the day. After that I get to work making sure I’ll be ready to do the same thing tomorrow.

That work breaks down into two major categories: helping our contributors turn ideas into published posts (editing, in other words), and building systems whose goals are to broaden our subject matter and make both the writing and editing processes easier.

Some things, I do every day

The bulk of my editing time goes toward helping contributors new and old create posts that fit our guidelines— whether you’re a brand new writer with lots of general thoughts or an expert with a deep and detailed expertise, making your point in just two sentences (take a closer look and you’ll notice that’s what nearly all of our introductions do), sticking to a single point, and keeping your post under 800 words can be tricky!

There are, of course, other short-term items to manage, like deciding on our post schedule, updating the featured posts that you see at the top of the home page, and supporting to our volunteer Breakfast Links curators and editors. (I edit Links on Wednesdays. I hope you like them!)

Others are more focused on the long-term

Our goal is always for our contributors to be even better at writing posts, and for us to have more of them who write about more areas and subjects. One big project I’ve been working on for making that happen is running sessions on how to write effective blog posts, where I teach folks what GGWash has learned and encourage them to write for us.

I also spend a lot of time reaching out to individuals and organizations about writing for us, on tracking and analyzing our site traffic, and on creating useful materials for writers, like post templates.

I love what I do, from the minutiae to the big picture. It’s also very rewarding to do it in such an engaged and knowledgable community. The more secure Greater Greater Washington’s future is, the more certain you can be that we’ll keep bringing you the same great content, and the more effort I can put into expanding it.

I hope you’ll give to our reader drive!