Dear Reader

Dear Reader,

Where’s My Weekly Dispatch?
We know that many of you noticed that the Indy‘s regular Saturday dispatch did not go out last Saturday or on Saturday March 12. We know because some of you took the time to write or text or call to alert us, and we thank you for your concern. There was a glitch in our mail program (which has been subsequently upgraded) and thanks to the intrepid work of Jeff Lee, we think that we have identified the problem and have fixed it, and that many of you are reading this on Saturday morning. Jeff is also responsible for seeing to it that the Indy finally did go out on Sunday, so heartfelt thanks to Jeff!

For those of you who follow our analytics in “What’s In This Issue,” you might have noticed that there was a considerable drop in readership for the two weeks that the Indy dispatch was delayed by a day. In a typical week, we get about a third of our hits between 6 a.m. and noon on Saturday. Losing Saturday morning results in a significant drop in readers, so we’re working hard to make sure that doesn’t happen again. We also want to remind you that if the Indy doesn’t show up in your inbox you can still access it at www.amherstindy.org. 

Some good news – we’re now posting new content every Wednesday as well as on Saturday, and folks have started to check in to see what’s new on Wednesday. Last Wednesday, we had a small but perceptible bump in our readership – 356 unique visits to the Indy, about 100 more than usual compared to the other Wednesdays in March, with each visitor reading an average of just under two articles. 

Subscribers
For many of you, the Indy may be showing up in your inbox for the first time today. In his investigations of the email glitch, Jeff also discovered that hundreds of folks who had subscribed to the Indy had inadvertently been excluded from the email list. We hope this, too, has been fixed. 

Another reminder:  with a free subscription (subscribe here), you can receive in your inbox, every Saturday at 6 a.m., a summary of the week’s Indy headlines with links to all of the articles. We promise that we won’t share your email address with anyone else, nor will we fill your inbox with junk. It will be just the Indy, once per week. And if you have subscribed and are still not receiving the Indy after this Saturday, please drop us a note at amherstindy@gmail.com and let us know. If you are signed up, one way you can help assure that the Indy arrives in your inbox and not your spam folder is to add our address — amherstindy@gmail.com — to your address book. 

The War In Ukraine
The war in Ukraine is now six weeks old and for the second month in a row we are devoting our end-of-the-month photo gallery to the war. As the war has progressed, the Russian invaders have turned increasingly to attacks on civilian infrastructure (hospitals, schools, public works) and homes, as well as murderous assaults on civilians themselves. Accounts of rape and looting by Russian soldiers abound. Thursday’s New York Times attempts to document the war on Ukrainian civilians. While documenting the extent of the devastation in a war zone poses no small number of challenges, the photos, and the horrific stories of survivors and refugees (current estimates suggest that 4 million Ukrainians have fled the country of 40 million, with a total of 10 million refugees anticipated) leave little doubt that several of Ukraine’s cities have been reduced to rubble and that Russia is engaged in a campaign of terror against the citizens of Ukraine. We post access to these poignant photos (we don’t post the copyrighted photos themselves) and the stories they tell so that we do not to forget, as we tend to our daily affairs, that a genocidal war is being waged elsewhere on the planet and its reverberations will be felt across the globe.

The Pandemic Is Not Over
While most folks may be done with the pandemic,  it appears that the pandemic is not done with us.  Pulitzer Prize winning COVID reporter Ed Yong has been warning  that the pandemic is not over and he is joined by a battalion of epidemiologists who decry the ongoing dismantling of testing and reporting infrastructure that will make it much more difficult to track and manage the next COVID wave (see, e.g., here). That wave is likely to come from the BA-2 variant of Omicron, which now represents over 50% of the cases in New England.

Since March of 2020, the Indy has been reporting COVID news and tracking case counts locally and beyond, first as the Daily COVID and then beginning in May of 2021 as the Weekly COVID-19 Update.  The updates offer an opportunity for a quick check on what’s going on with the virus and a reminder of the degree to which it is still with us. Updates provide  case and death counts, locally, statewide, nationally and globally,  as well as a compendium of links to the latest COVID news.  You can get a pretty good sense of the latest COVID trends by spending just a few minutes browsing the headlines of our COVID news section.   

Thanks for reading the Indy!

Art

Art Keene

Managing Editor

Amherst Indy

www.amherstindy.org