Welcome to the new, electronic version of the ISOP newsletter! I've taken the liberty of naming it the Stentor, because I could not resist the pun. Those of you who took some classical-literature courses probably remember that the original Stentor (in the Iliad) was a herald; the ciliate genus is named for him. So, this is kind of the Protistologists' Herald-Tribune.

As the new Society Webmaster, I've also been updating much of the pre-existing portions of the site (see accompanying article). The newsletter is complementary to the rest of the site, being more news-oriented and less reference-oriented. I'm hoping that it will become a home for announcements, opinion pieces, and interesting news from and about Society members.

You have probably noticed that the newsletter is styled slightly differently from the rest of the website. The software that is sitting behind the scenes is a content-management package, which works a great deal like the electronic manuscript submission software that we all know and love. The raw content for the pages is stored, and is dynamically configured by a template to create the finished webpage. This means that we can easily create new sections of the newsletter, and individuals can also make arrangements with me to post their own articles--no Web-design experience required. If you would like to learn how to use this system, email me and I'll send you a tutorial.

I am, of course, looking for contributions. Almost anything related to protists, the membership, or the broader protist community would be welcome, both news/announcements and commentary or opinion pieces. If you have an item that you'd like to contribute, you can just send me the content (text and graphics), and I'll take it from there. You don't need to worry about doing any layout, although if there's a particular way you'd like the article to look, you can send me a sketch or diagram to work from.

Some individuals have already agreed to write an ongoing series of articles for the newsletter, and I'd be very happy to work with any other possible "columnists", either individuals or groups. For that matter, if someone would like to propose a new category of articles for the newsletter that they would act as sub-editor for, drop me a line--I'll do everything I can to make it easy for you.

Thanks for reading!

Andrea