I am incredibly excited to announce that Joseph Trevithick is joining The War Zone. Joseph will bring his outstanding research and writing skills to the site, and together we plan to greatly expand and deepen The War Zone’s coverage on all topics related to the military, defense technology, and human conflict. Joseph has degrees from Carnegie Mellon and Georgetown in history, conflict resolution and international relations and comes to us from Globalsecurity.org, and more recently Warisboring.com where he was an associate editor. His work has also been seen on many of the sites we link to regularly, including Small Arms Review, Small Arms Defense

Joe explains how he got into the defense journalism business and a bit about where his interests lie:

 

“In 2008, I started tracking defense and security developments full time as part of my work at GlobalSecurity.org. When I had to move on five years later because of the organization’s funding constraints, I wasn’t sure where to go next. For me, this work is a lot like a puzzle. Research and other leads often turn up a lot of little bits that might not be of interest by themselves, but when put them all together you often find something really interesting. After picking up some small freelance work, I quickly realized that journalism blended so much of what I loved in one package. I could research, dig, pull at threads and put everything back together in a way that might put a different light on things. Often with help from thousands of pages I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, I published stories at War Is Boring and other outlets on serious matters like civilian casualties  from coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, shady contractors in Afghanistan and shadowy special operations missions. But I also explored historical curiosities like a C-130 that could take off and land from inside a soccer stadium, pigeon-powered sensors and plans for gun-toting space soldiers. Though sometimes humorous, these projects can offer insights into weapons and warfare today. So much of these business is connected—old things made new again—and that’s what I love about it. I hope to keep sharing my own curiosity at The War Zone.”

So please, give Joseph a warm welcome and look forward to seeing his writing pop-up exclusively here on the The War Zone soon.

Another programming note—the comments system is getting a series of rapid upgrades based on all your feedback. A white list option is now available that allows me to assign greater freedom to the discussion section’s most prolific, loyal and respectful voices. Basically it gives anyone who is on it the ability to post without any auto moderation. As you probably have noticed, we have tried to really tighten up moderation in the discussion section, getting rid of the overtly distracting or disrespectful voices wherever possible. This new option will just increase the already awesome quality of our community and will reward those who come wanting to add to the discussion in a quality manner—whether it be via great questions, answers or humor. Other functions, such a discussion threading, will be added soon along with some cool new tools we can use to move the discussion in unique directions.

Also, if you haven’t please follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and be sure to follow my personal Twitter as there’s a ton of unique content that goes through there that doesn’t make it to the site. Often times I am asked why I didn’t cover this or that, and usually I have retweeted someone else’s coverage on that same topic because someone else had a good take on it. Beyond that, I would love to see and banter with you in the Twitter-verse.

Above all else, I want to thank you all so much for all your comments, emails and reads over the last ten months. It was not easy leaving my past creation to start from scratch again, and you have all made it incredibly rewarding even on its toughest days. Now I can’t wait to show you what we have in store for you next.