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“It’s an exciting time to be an editor”: Dan Parker on the OUPblog

On the tenth anniversary of OUPblog, we’ve asked past editors and current editors to reflect on their experiences and favorite memories. Today we speak to Dan Parker who has been a UK editor of OUPblog since last summer.

I only joined the OUPblog team in May 2014, so I am still a relative newbie. Before becoming an editor, most of my involvement with the blog was as an avid reader and regular contributor from the PR department. My early contributions ranged from helping readers survive a zombie apocalypse to connecting the worlds of Shakespeare and tennis. I found it very satisfying to either come up with my own original content or work with authors to produce articles for the OUPblog. Therefore, when the chance to become an editor of the OUPblog came up, I jumped at it.

It’s an exciting time to be an editor of the OUPblog. Over the course of the last ten years, the blog has gone from strength to strength and flourished as one of the most widely read academic blogs in the world. In order to help the blog continue to develop, the focus has been on reaching the right communities with the right content. By concentrating on generating content for different disciplines, from American History to Music, and from Medicine to Philosophy, we are aiming to grow our reach and engagement within these communities.

Take the Economics discipline for example. In April 2014, we formed a group with a focus on developing content for and doing outreach in the academic economics community. It has produced weekly blog posts for the OUPblog for the past 15 months. These posts focus on a variety of different economic issues and help grow our (and our authors’) voice within the community. We know we’re reaching the right audience when our blog articles, quizzes, and virtual issues are frequently cross-posted on media sites such as LSE Politics and Policy, PSA Women in Politics, Angry Bear Blog, and even CNN. The range of sites also shows that we are reaching a diverse audience within the economic community: academics, practitioners, educators, and students for example.

One of the most enjoyable things about the OUPblog, both as a reader and as an editor, is the diversity of the content, even within a specific subject area. For instance, within the economics discipline, one week you could be learning about macroeconomics and how this affects global warming, and the very next week you could be discovering ten facts about gender inequality in the labour market. It is an absolute pleasure to work with the blog and learn something completely new each day. I guess that’s one of the reasons the OUPblog has been so successful for the past ten years, and why communities like economics, medicine, psychology, and philosophy have thrived in the past year.

I am delighted to wish the OUPblog a happy tenth birthday, and I can’t wait to work closely with it during its teen years, and maybe even its twenties.

Featured image credit: MacBook Pro, by Patrick Rasenberg. CC-BY-NC-2.0 via Flickr.

Recent Comments

  1. EditingWorm

    Interesting article. One slight error: macroeconomics *affects* global warming.

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