Writing for the Flight Standards Retirees – Jan 2010

I've been doing the editor's job since 2007.  It is nice to be able to see the result of one's effort at consolidating officer input, identifying outside articles for outside, and then putting it all together and published/mailed by our contractor.  For those of you that are not aware of how we do it, we supply our contractor with our newsletter – using e-mail – and he then has it printed, address labels added, and then mailed for us.

 In the editing part, a big part of the work is assembling the input from our president, our VP, our secretary-treasurer, our chaplain/historian, and our webmaster.  Making all of this input fit into a newsletter  in a way that, hopefully, holds everybody's interest and yet is informative to  our membership is what I'm trying to do.  Digging out items from other sources that may be of interest to you is a bit of an extra effort.  If you out in our general membership were to send in more stories of your experiences, or articles that you found that seem interesting, then it might not be necessary for me to add anything to the newsletter.  The effort would be centered on making it all fit (and to run through with spell-check, etc.).

 It has been a good many times that we've pointed out that our organization is one that is run by volunteers among those of us that have retired (or had other FSR association).  As one of those volunteers, I am looking to pass on the torch.  If there is anyone out there that would even consider helping with the newsletter, I would welcome that bit of help. 

 T o do our Editor job, you probably do need to know how to use a computer and a program such as Microsoft's Word.  I can't imagine how one could put together a newsletter without that knowledge.  There are some software programs that are aimed at publishing a newsletter.  Microsoft's “Publisher” is one.  I've not been able to figure it out though.  I must be getting old; cutting pasting, etc. with Word may be extra work, but at least I can do a reasonable job using it.

 When I took on the job of editor, our FSR officers were talking about hiring an outsider to do the newsletter.  Somehow that just does not sound like what we should be doing.  Our retiree group has been there and done the work.  To have someone from the outside assemble and write things for us just doesn't seem to be what we want to do with our future newsletters.  Now, less you think that I am throwing in the towel, be advised that I said that I would do 2010 and I will.  For 2011, however, we need to find someone else that will take on the task.

Jack Kenton