Making the decision as to who to hire as staff writers was an extremely difficult choice, one of the toughest BME dilemas I've ever had. There's no one on the final set that isn't writing better than I was when I started doing BME/News — and that's more of a commentary on their highly evolved skills, style, and talent, than my lack of them.
Making the decision I took into consideration their writing and interview abilities, their peripheral knowledge and skills that will help on the job (Photoshop work, HTML abilitiy), their life experiences, how they express themselves in their blogs, what the interviewees said about the interaction, personal impression (I've met both Matt and Jordon in person — his band played BMEfest 2003 among other things), gut instinct, and the advice of people who I trust to tell me the truth.
I even asked one of the authors to write a follow-up article (which will likely be posted as their first column) so I could be totally sure in my decision…!
When it comes down to it I don't have a single bad thing to say about any of these top three. I'd actually looked into the feasibility of hiring all of them, but I think it would be stretching myself a little more financially than I can afford to (although if this works out who knows, maybe). But… Without further blathering, here are the two new BME staff writers:
I also want to say a giant thank you to Matt Lodder (IAM:volatile). It was an incredibly close decision and I know you could have done a great job and I hope we can work together in the future.
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