A three part series on the future of MC & HIV (Part 2 of 3)
Read Part 1 of the series.
The Vision & The Reality
This is what I envisioned for this blog:
Male Circumcision & HIV seeks to engage the public in policy questions regarding the nexus of male circumcision and HIV. It is an aggregation of media critique, interviews, original reporting, and travelogue to the regions of the world where HIV has hit hardest.
This is how the blog has developed in reality.
Male Circumcision & HIV is a layperson's weblog that posts primarily media critique and the occasional summary of recent studies on the issue of male circumcision and HIV.
In the beginning, I invited various people to step in and post items occasionally in order to ensure frequent posts with a multitude of voices on this issue. This was a tricky proposition because it takes a special type of person to write about this issue. Thoughtful, literate, and sensitive are three important characteristics. So is thick skin that won't easily chafe under the strains of difficult and disagreeable news. It is important that contributors are committed to the issues, which has narrowed the candidate pool considerably to those I have some familiarity with.
Little came of my entreaties to join me. A few people expressed interest, but nothing came of any of it. It was in these dark moments when the posting schedule had become once a week or long stretches of no posts were followed by two or three in a week, I began to wonder what is the impact of this blog anyway.
We get between 50 to 75 hits a day. About 35% are returning readers who receive the posts by RSS feed or who have presumably bookmarked us. About 55% are random and come to us through search engines. The rest, about 10%, come through Google Ads.
We also have regular visits from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, and many other professional organizations and educational institutions. South Africa and other African countries provide a large group of visitors as does the rest of the world, particularly North America, Australia and New Zealand.
Moving the Reality Closer to the Vision
Bringing the reality closer to the vision requires two things. Money and time. True, dedication is necessary. A strong stomach for a fight doesn't hurt. A formal plan would be useful. An assistant and an intern would be welcome. But the prerequisites are money and time. In that order.
Why is money important? Because money buys time. Mine and that of others who would work on this project. Infrastructure is cheap. About 50 cents a day. But the costs of molding the raw material of information and information technology into a coherent and effective policy voice are not inconsequential.
Tomorrow, Is A Business Model for Independent and Specialized Journalism What We Need? (Spoiler: Yes.)
