Home > IV Online magazine > 2005 > IV367 - May 2005 > Changes to International Viewpoint

Building on successes so far

Changes to International Viewpoint

How You Can Help

Monday 2 May 2005

Save this article in PDF Version imprimable de cet article Version imprimable

The meeting of the IV editorial group in April projected several changes to improve the service which the magazine gives to its readers.

Making an overall balance sheet, the meeting noted major advances through becoming an e-magazine, which are widely recognised by IV supporters and readers.

By becoming an e-magazine the journal has managed a much more rapid delivery of articles than it did in its printed form. Production and postal problems with the printed magazine meant severe delays in getting out IV’s message, especially to important areas outside Europe - notably North America, Asia and Africa.

Today’s e-magazine means that we can get articles out as soon as they are ready, and its has also meant that we can much more easily make available the "news" articles and online documents. The many hundreds of hits we are
getting daily shows the success of this project. To take it forward we have decided on the following measures:

 We will produce, at the end of each month, a pdf file containing all the articles from that "issue". This will have minimum design features, and will enable readers to easily print out the whole issue. Sections of the FI and sympathetic organisations can use this pdf file for the production of local bulletins, for internal or public use. Of course, it will be possible to print out individual or several articles from this file, according to the reader’s needs. The pdfs for the March and April issues have already been posted. Go to the online magazine section to find them.

 We will add new sections including links to useful and important articles and documents from other sites, as well as linking to useful non-Fourth International Marxist, workers movement and global justice sites. Through these measures we hope to make International Viewpoint not only an interesting and useful website in its own right, but also a portal through which its readers can easily surf to other sites of related interest. Recognising that many IV readers are not native English speakers, we decided
to include links to articles,documents and sites in other major languages.

 We intend to add email links to the site which will allow readers to directly contact the IV team with comments and suggestions, but also to contact the Fourth International.

 In due course we are going to add a section for book reviews and notices to the site in order to alert readers to relevant books they may not have noticed.

 We decided that newly published documents and debate items will go first, for a limited period, into the ’this month’s issue’ section so that readers are immediately alerted to their inclusion.

How you can help

IV still needs money. A big majority of our articles are not written in English and therefore need to be translated. We do not have translators who can put in many hours each month free of charge, nor should they have to. We don’t pay what translators would get at the UN or the EU or working for banks; but we try to pay a reasonable amount which can compensate for the lost working time that our translators contribute. This costs hundreds of dollars every month; without this expenditure, the website would not exist.

Access to our website is free, and so it should be, all the more so in that we know that it is accessed by hundreds of comrades from poorer countries. That means we don’t have a revenue stream to finance the site from; we rely on readers’ contributions and donations. Help us to continue this work and make the site even more successful.

We have made giving very easy by the inclusion of the ’Make a Donation’ button on the front page, in the left-hand red column. This uses the PayPal system. Just click the link and follow the on-line instructions. We won’t waste a penny.