May 5 will see the launch of Ars Technica UK, our first overseas initiative aimed at broadening and deepening our reporting on all things technology. A major milestone, the launch comes just one month shy of Ars Technica's 17th birthday. It's hard to believe I've been doing this for nearly half of my life, but even more unbelievable is that I've never been more excited for Ars Technica as I am today. The US side of Ars Technica just finished crushing our previous quarterly records in traffic and revenue, and we've put together an amazing team to lead our efforts in the UK. We're going to have a community party in London to kick it all off, and we hope to see as many of you there as possible. You'll find more details about the party near the end of this post.
First, however, I want to explain a bit about what Ars Technica UK is and how it will work. Ars Technica UK is about bringing everyone more content and more insight into technology in the way only Ars Technica does. But it is also about introducing Ars Technica to a new audience in Britannia, and it will cover stories of interest particularly to a UK audience, too. As a result, we will have two front pages, the one you know and love now, but also a new home at arstechnica.co.uk. You can choose whichever edition you wish to follow, or you can jump back and forth as often as you like.
We are working hard on the platform-side to keep the user experience essentially the same no matter where you are, and we have methods planned to make it easy for everyone to see all content, whether it was written by the UK or US, should they desire to do so. All user logins, forums, comments, etc., will remain the same. When we launch next week, we invite you to check it all out, and to let us know what you think on the OpenForum.
I will now turn it over to Sebastian Anthony, the editor of Ars Technica UK, to introduce the team and spill the details on our community gathering!
The Ars Technica UK team
The Ars Technica UK editorial team consists of me (Sebastian Anthony), Mark Walton, Glyn Moody, and Cathleen O'Grady.
I am the editor of Ars Technica UK, and ultimately in charge of UK editorial and everything that we publish. My background is in programming, system administration, and electronics—but really, I will be writing about almost any facet of technology that catches my eye. Back when we first announced Ars Technica UK, our supreme leader Ken Fisher had some nice things to say about me.
Mark will cover hardware and gaming; Glyn will expand Ars Technica's authoritative policy coverage to the UK and Europe; and Cathleen will continue her excellent work in reporting on science and culture, but with more of a focus on this side of the Atlantic. You will have hopefully seen some of our stories already on Ars Technica, but starting from May 5, you will be seeing a lot more from us. Over the next few weeks and months, there will be a large number of reports and long-form features from the UK team that span the gamut of our areas of expertise, from PC gaming, to materials science, to the latest nefarious megacorp-sponsored trade treaties.
Ars Technica UK is based out of a lovely office in central London, right off Regent Street, on Hanover Square. Our headquarters put us in an ideal position to cover the London tech scene and to venture out into the countryside to visit British technology and engineering powerhouses such as ARM and McLaren or world-leading research groups at universities like Oxford and Cambridge. We will also pay close attention to what's going on over in continental Europe.
Community meetup
Finally, I have the pleasure of announcing Ars Technica UK's first community meetup! It will be on May 7, at The Running Horse in Mayfair, central London (it's actually right by our UK office). Ken and I will be there, along with a few other members of the UK team. It will be a very laid back affair: we've reserved a room upstairs at a pub, and we're just going to sit, drink, and chat for a few hours.
Because this is the first time we've done such a thing in London, we are playing things conservatively by releasing a fixed number of tickets through Eventbrite. If there's a lot of interest, we will run another meetup in the future with higher capacity.
After many months of hard work, Ars Technica UK is just about ready to launch. The whole editorial team is excited to get moving on one of the biggest changes in Ars Technica's 17-year history.
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