Just curious why the SD Page is All Cecil? Are Staff Reports gone?
Because Dex hasn’t been nagging the staff enough lately. The folks who write Staff Reports are all volunteers, and sometimes it just happens that not very many of them are volunteering.
I prefer to think of Dex as a nudzh. 
The problem is more of an editing logjam. I haven’t had time to edit Staff Reports myself, and the regular Straight Dope copy editor hasn’t had time to get to them either. The Straight Dope Science Advisory Board has stepped up to give columns a preliminary edit, but they still need a final going over by a professional editor. Partly SRs are a victim of their own success. Early ones were short and involved only a modest amount of writing and editing. Later ones have been lengthy and detailed and editing them is quite a production.
There’s a couple of qualified/experienced sub-editors on the boards (including myself) who might be persuaded to lend a hand, FWIW.
Volunteer reports with volunteer editing. That’s the way money is made nowadays: User generated everything.
That’s certainly a strong trend in the media at the moment, but I don’t think anyone’s making any money out of it FWIW.
I haven’t been nagging because there’s a logjam, and I feel guilty about asking people to write staff reports when there are drafts over a year old waiting in the queue. We have tried implementing volunteer editing, and that got a couple of recent ones, but that seems to have faltered as well.
Just put them up unedited, and we’ll all go at them, wiki-style.
My apologies to the staff for the mistaken impugning, then. I know that back when I was on staff, that was the most common explanation.
Thanks for the update; I have one in the queue myself.
And IMHO this is a problem: some of the SR’s were reaching the length and scope of study papers. I’m not against in depth study - far from it - but this isn’t the place. I tend to like columns that are short and snappy. I know others differ.
Icanhazcheezburger or however you spell it seems to think they are.
I suspect you’ll find most of their sales probably come from advertising or merchandise sales, but UGC (User Generated Content) is something that’s being used as polyfiller (for want of a better term) in more mainstream news websites. Got a really short news article? Open it up to reader commentary! No information for a news story? Look up someone’s Facebook page or Twitter feed to get some background! Still got some space to fill? Publish a selection of comments from the online edition!
Personally, I don’t think UGC is necessarily a bad thing, in and of itself, but the problem is how it’s implemented. Which is probably a discussion for another thread…
One difference between Staff Reports and Columns is that Columns are limited in length; they appear in newspapers and can only be so long. Staff Reports aren’t limited in length, and thus topics that can’t be answered succinctly tend to fall to Staff Reports, rather than columns. Henc,e, yeah, SRs tend to be longer.