Good content remains king
Edward P. Salek, CAE, Executive Director | TLT Headquarters Report March 2022
Quality and quantity make TLT a success.
Some people have called it “concentration disorder.” The main symptom is a dwindling adult attention span that dropped from 12 seconds 20 years ago to eight seconds today, according to research. By the way, these same researchers note that a goldfish has an attention span of about nine seconds.
Trends in all types of media and publishing may be the cause of this drop or perhaps the result. The standard for a TikTok video has been 15 seconds, although that’s bumped up to as long as three minutes lately. Newspaper stories average 500 words, and the typical magazine story is about 1,500 words.
Which brings us to this month’s issue of TLT, which includes a Feature article (Metalworking fluids: Current options for machining multi-metal alloys) that’s about 5,000 words long. This is not an aberration. TLT averages 82 pages and six technical articles per issue. Annual total equals 1,152 pages, including 71 full-length technical articles.
So why in a bite-sized world does a super-sized magazine rank as STLE’s most valued member service? One explanation is that STLE has an exceptionally intelligent and engaged audience. But it also may be part of a trend running contrary to the concentration disorder syndrome.
Geoffrey Director, a senior executive with the Manifest content marketing agency, recently wrote, “Consumers are begging for a meaty piece of content to transfix them, relieve them of the din of buzzing ads and clickbait and switch them on. If the content is good enough, people will consume it. Consumers will go to extreme lengths to engage with content they really value.”
STLE’s success with this concept is a direct result of the TLT editorial team knowing how to create articles that are relevant to the education and information needs of this audience. Key players in this effort are the 51 members of the TLT Editorial Advisory Board.
This group, which is a mix of technical experts from industry and academics from around the world, is responsible for developing content ideas for TLT feature articles, lubrication fundamentals, best practices, surveys and technical interviews. Members of the Editorial Advisory Board serve as Technical Editors and work with TLT’s editorial team to create articles around their content ideas and to review the articles for technical accuracy.
Offering multiple options for consuming TLT’s meaty content works in tandem with the emphasis on subject matter identification and writing. All STLE members get a print copy of the magazine delivered to their mailbox every month. But, in addition,
www.stle.org provides a digital replica of the issue and an archive of past issues dating back to 2009. The Learning Pathways service, also found at
www.stle.org, presents TLT articles organized by topic area.
STLE Corporate Members now have an additional benefit tied to TLT. A new Future Leaders Rewards (FLR) program allows the Corporate Member representative to select two non-STLE-member employees to become TLT subscribers for a full year at no charge.
The FLR program provides companies and organizations with a way to commend rising stars—future leaders in the lubrication and tribology fields—by familiarizing them with the industry’s premiere professional society and one of its best-known services.
To find out more about the FLR program and Corporate Membership, contact Tracy Nicholas VanEe, STLE national sales manager/Corporate Member liaison, at
emeraldcomminc@yahoo.com.
Current STLE Corporate Members can initiate the TLT subscription for two employees at their company by completing the subscriber profiles at
https://bit.ly/Future_Leaders_Rewards.
You can reach Certified Association Executive Ed Salek at esalek@stle.org.