The best part of TLT

Thomas T. Astrene and Karl M. Phipps | TLT Publisher's Pen October 2013

Please join us in celebrating an important milestone for one of STLE’s signature services.

 

WHAT IS THE BEST PART OF PUBLISHING TLT EVERY MONTH? Without question, it’s the opportunity to contribute, in even a small way, to the incredible work being performed every day by STLE members in every part of the world.

We jokingly explain tribology to interested bystanders as the important science with the funny name. But you can’t publish a magazine about tribology every month for 10 years without falling, at least a little bit, under its spell.

Tribology is intriguing, eminently practical—and everywhere! Even we publisher types can see why engineers and chemists first become interested in it, then fascinated by and finally hooked on it. Then they devote their lives to it.

Observing from the sidelines, we can only marvel at the technological wonders STLE members achieve every day in industry, science, medicine and just about every other discipline you can name. In short, STLE members make everything work better. They might not make the world spin, but they definitely keep it moving.

TLT’s role in the operation is providing technical information STLE members can use to perform their jobs better. We’ve been doing it for 10 years now, but believe us when we say getting started wasn’t easy. The hardest part was figuring out where that information would come from. After all, what do you tell people who are the world’s leading experts on a topic? And who’s going to tell them?

In the end the answer was obvious. The only group of people technically qualified to inform STLE members is other STLE members. And that’s where we turned for help.

During the past 10 years, three STLE members have served as TLT’s editor, and each of them in their own way insisted on continually raising the content bar. And that’s just the start. Dozens of volunteers have served as TLT technical editors, keeping track of emerging technologies and telling us the best ways to report on them. By granting interview requests from our writers, hundreds of STLE members have generously shared their knowledge and experience—simply in the interest of advancing the science for the betterment of all.

Help came from other areas, too. From the beginning, STLE Corporate Members trusted us to be their marketing partner (their reward is reaching an audience of more than 13,000 lubrication professionals each month). And we’ve had nothing but support from the STLE board. Indeed, TLT started 10 years ago as an initiative from the board.

So this month we invite you to celebrate with us. It’s been a decade of feature articles, columns, best practices, research papers, anecdotes, opinions, surveys, case studies, interviews, member profiles, editorials and more.

The best part of TLT? Our readers, of course. They are the magazine. What we editors do every month is look for ways to keep them informed, engaged and connected. It really has been our privilege to be part of it all, and we pledge to keep making the magazine an even more valuable resource for you.

2003-2013. We’ve done it for ten. Let’s do it again.

Tom & Karl


Tom Astrene


Karl Phipps