2946-06-07 - Editor's Loudspeaker: Responding to Audience Feedback

Wow.

Firstly, thank all of you who have sent feedback to the Cosmic Backgrounds team about this new feature - it's not even three shifts old, and we've already had hundreds of messages from the audience suggesting things we could focus on. Given that we know based on ingestion metrics that approximately ten to twelve percent of our audience members are out of range of any Hypercomm Relays at any given time, and far less than a third of our audience ingests our new content within the first twenty-four hours of its being published, this bodes well for the future of the Tales from the Inbox text feed feature.

Secondly, I need to address a common themes I've seen in the messages we've gotten Almost two thirds of the input I got suggested that I specifically focus on publishing stories related to the Reachers, the Angels, or both. A third of them suggest that I use this feed to catalog the frontier encounters which may be first sightings of the vessels of new xenosapient species.

• While I do expect that we'll have content that touches on the Angels occasionally, be aware that Cosmic Backgrounds is subject to the law of the Confederated Worlds, and we cannot publish anything Naval Intelligence designates as a military secret, and that includes almost everything related to the Angels. If military secrets are broadcast to the datasphere from our studio, the resulting fines would probably put us out of business. If we are handed a story about the Angels, it is studio policy to give our local Naval Intelligence office the right to veto whatever content we make out of it, before it is published. Most of our audience know this already, but just as a reminder, those rules apply to the text feed, too.
• The Reachers, by contrast, are legally fair game, and most of you already know how much we like to talk about them. Cosmic Backgrounds has been at the forefront of the re-entry of these odd, elusive sapients into the cultural forefront, after centuries of being considered nothing more than a data point in the historical record. Where I find reasonably plausible accounts of Reacher involvement in human affairs, I will of course share those stories, if they are sufficiently interesting. Since this is a text feed, I will leave playback of simple visual recordings to Sovanna, and focus on encounters which have a more interesting course of events.
• The intent of this feed was not to turn it into a repository for stories about mysterious xenosapient encounters. We will have some content which fits that description, but not all of the dramatic events which take place on the Frontier have something to do with rare xenosapients. If you only wish to see accounts of a certain type, you can always configure your data ingestion protocol to search for the desired meta-tags.

Check your ingestion queue tomorrow for another exciting audience submission on Tales from the Inbox!

--Duncan