When I wrote to you last week, it was about the way spikes and surges in readership of articles on our site can alert us changes in the world outside. So, when, at the Republican Convention, Ben Carson linked Hillary Clinton, Saul Alinsky, and Lucifer, a two-year-old NPQ newswire about Clinton’s correspondence with Alinsky saw a small run of interest. (One reader read my missive as though I thought Carson had a point—not so, in case any of the rest of you were wondering!)

But sometimes these readership runs are based as much on what is not happening as what is. For instance, I wrote a newswire a year ago on the appalling statistics related to police violence against Native Americans. In the relative dearth of coverage given to that subject, this one newswire has resurfaced again and again. In fact, it has the highest readership of anything we have published at NPQ in the last year and a half, with more than 65,000 readers. This tells us that those interested in concerns between the Native American and law enforcement communities have too little coverage to turn to, and that alerts us to a greater responsibility to cover the activism and the issues there.

And, of course, this comes around to another request from us to hear from any NPQ readers who might be interested in becoming part of our brilliant volunteer newswriting force. We always need more capacity and more writers.