In 1983 when our founder Mac Conway launched SiteNet, he had already helmed the magazine and Conway Data for 29 years and published tens of thousands of pages of reports and directories. I can see them on our office shelves, bound in books.
I was 19 years old then, a sophomore in college and bound up in books myself, on a continuum that encompassed poetry, French, the Beat Generation, Ultimate Frisbee, philosophy, snooker in the game room, tennis, theater and writing for my school’s literary magazine and weekly newspaper.
Waiting for news to be delivered was an accepted fact of life. But Mac didn’t accept it. So SiteNet was conceived as the proverbial one-stop shop, in electronic form, for information about industrial sites and buildings around the world. I have in front of me an ad we ran for it with instructions on how to access it. Step 1: “Set up your computer with telephone modem switched to 300 baud, full duplex, 8 bit, no parity.”
That sounds funny in today’s quantum era. But connections abound: That breakthrough modem had been invented two years earlier by our Atlanta suburb neighbor Dennis Hayes of Hayes Microcomputer Products. I got to meet Hayes in 2018 during a commemoration ceremony across the street from our HQ as the City of Peachtree Corners launched a partnership with Mac Conway’s alma mater Georgia Tech.
At Conway Data the wait is over: This month marks the debut of the redesigned Site Selection website. Thanks to the work of Designer Ashleigh Porter, Director of Programming and Analytics Daniel Boyer and the whole team at Conway Data and at Indiana-based Rare Bird, we’ve arrived at a next-generation site that is, as our announcement says later in this issue, user-friendly, visually oriented, modern, seamless and as attuned as ever to the need for data.
This is a new era of print and digital integration here at Site Selection. The publication you hold in your hands will continue to be the most valuable publication in its field, showcasing exclusive conversations, analytics, rankings and blockbuster projects as only Site Selection can. Our new promotional series, put together by our crack team of designers and also launched in this issue, reinforces that message.
At the same time, we are not waiting around to tell the stories and publish the business intelligence we know our global readers crave via our new website, our Site Selection Investor Watch e-mail newsletter and its family of online departments such as the Online Insider, Project Bulletin and Site Selection Snapshot. To sign up, visit siteselection.com/newsletter-subscription. Advertisers welcome!
Check out the following pages. Visit the rich content and searchable archives of the new siteselection.com. Write to us at webmaster@conway.com or to me at adam.bruns@conway.com to let us know how we’re doing and what we need to do better.
In the meantime, we’ll keep getting after it. There’s no sense in waiting around. — Adam Bruns, Editor in Chief
