If First Things is a Family Does That Make Me Cousin Oliver?

Earlier this week in a post on fundraising—by the way, have you made a donation and taken advantage of the half-price print subscription rate ?—a reader asked:

For its readers, does FT consider them “family,” part of a greater FT community?

That’s an excellent question. I suspect all of us on staff at First Things think in terms of a familial-community relationship when it comes to the interaction between the magazine and website and our readers and contributors. What we are less clear about is how our readers view this relationship.

My impression is that the FT community is comprised of several sub-groups that have greater or lesser degrees of overlap with each other. For example, there are some readers of our magazine who participate in ROFTERS groups, but do not read the website or blogs, and there are online readers who interact with us exclusively on the web and do not read the magazine at all (one commenter at Evangel expressed surprise to find there was a print edition of First Things !).

While we want to bring all of these disparate members of the FT family together, we don’t want to ignore or downplay the value of any particular subgroup. Nevertheless, I consider the audience for our blogs to be a particularly important group that should be cultivated. Indeed, one of my primary concerns as web editor is bringing people into the fold who did not start out reading the magazine. I am still learning how we should approach that task and would love to have your input.

I would also be interested in hearing how many branches of the FT family you are a part of. Do you subscribe to the magazine or just read the blogs? Do you read the On the Square features? How many of our seven blogs do you read? What is your religious background? How do you perceive your place in the FT community?

Answers to these types of questions will help us to ensure you feel at home here, so please let us know what you think.