Editor's notebook (results of readership survey).

• Author: Mildon, Marsha

It always gives me a bit of a shock when we start a new volume of LawNow: this issue marking the start of volume 23. This means that with our earlier incarnation, Resource News, and its metamorphosis into LawNow, we have been publishing legal information for the public for 23 years. What's more, the start of volume 23 marks the start of my seventh consecutive year as Editor, the start of Teresa Mitchell's ninth year as Associate Editor, and that doesn't even begin to mention the longevity of our artist, designers, marketing and administrative staff. So it probably won't surprise any of you reading this to know that LawNow is a matter of deeply personal interest, concern, and excitement for us here. When articles or columns come in, we mill around and read out good lines. When each issue comes from the printer, we cluck and coo like proud new parents over its good points, and sometimes, things we wish we'd done better.

Throughout it all, we have had a sense of our readers -- sometimes through letters to the editor or the reader's survey in the back of the magazine; sometimes through direct comments garnered everywhere from parties to soccer games to bed & breakfasts -- and we've tried hard to meet the needs and interests of those readers. But just in time for volume 23, our marketing team have completed a readership survey that gives us, for the first time, some hard data on who our readers are and what interests them. Personally, as well as editorially, I am delighted with what we learned.

It seems as though there really is a LawNow community out there as we had imagined; you may not know each other face-to-face, but with us, you have many common interests and concerns. Of course, these are general trends, but they do draw a kind of outline portrait of a savvy, concerned, and active community.

For example, it seems that in general, you are well educated, active members of your community, with 86% volunteering some of your time in community activities. You are interested for professional reasons, but also out of general concern, in looking at the legal perspective on social issues and the social perspective on legal issues. As a group, you are most concerned about the area of family law, and particularly about the way in which poverty is affecting families. Family violence; impoverished seniors, parents involvement with children and their schools; students' rights; and youth law were among the specifics mentioned as examples of the general...