FERMINEWS: From Village Crier to Global Village

by Mike Perricone

The publication now called FERMINEWS was established in 1969 as The Village Crier, named for the original Village where most of Fermilab was headquartered on the east side of the 6,800-acre site.

The Village remains alive and well, though Fermilab's headquarters has long since shifted to 16-story Wilson Hall. Renamed in 1978, FERMINEWS has evolved from a hometown journal to a newsmagazine with a worldwide circulation of nearly 14,000—a readership now encompassing a global village of high-energy physics.

As Fermilab Director Michael Witherell recently said in his welcoming remarks for the Lepton-Photon 2003 conference: "At an international symposium like this we celebrate not only the vitality of our science but also the international nature of particle physics...I would like to take this opportunity to reaffirm that we will continue to move steadily in the direction of a more internationally linked scientific community. It is the only way for us to pursue our science, and it serves all of our home nations as well."

During its publishing history, FERMINEWS has sought to look both inward, with news of the laboratory for its internal readership, and outward, with news of high-energy physics for its readership beyond the laboratory. With the advent of Fermilab Today, the lab's daily e-journal (www.fnal.gov/today/) launched on July 21, 2003, internal communications took an energetic new direction, with possibilities still to be imagined. As a result, the time seemed right for FERMINEWS to expand its outward reach—to serve the laboratory and our science by speaking more directly to that global village of high-energy physics.

With this issue, dated September 2003, FERMINEWS now comes to you monthly. There are more changes on the horizon, in both content and design. As a monthly, FERMINEWS will strive to offer a greater degree of perspective and context for the developments we report. We will also strive to extend our reach and bring you more often news from such leading centers of high-energy physics research as Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California; CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland; DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Germany); and KEK, the High-Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Japan.

FERMINEWS might look the same for a while, but you can’t judge this new outlook by its cover.