Letter From The Editor: Welcome To TWZ
To all our incredible readers, welcome aboard TWZ.com!
Today is truly a special day. I'm ecstatic to formally announce that The War Zone is finally its own site. Not only that, but we are under a new web address that reflects the short-hand name that we, and many of our readers, refer to The War Zone as — TWZ.com.
We also have a great launch sponsor for the new site, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. They are leaders in the uncrewed aircraft space and we are leaders when it comes to writing about uncrewed systems. It's a great match and we really appreciate their support.
It has been nearly eight years — which is approaching eternity in today's 'internet years' — since The War Zone first launched. Like what came before, it was just a one-man show. We soon grew, adding Joseph Trevithick, and in subsequent years that passed, we built out a small, ridiculously agile team, along with a curated group of contributors, that punches far above its weight.
Producing this site is incredibly challenging. We cover the air, sea, land, space, and cyber domains of warfare and wrap it all up in a geopolitical bow. We take the world's most complex and opaque technological topics and convey them in a way that anyone can understand, regardless of their background, and we do so in more depth than the competition. These two things seem at odds, but we have developed a magic formula to make them work as one. We see this as a critical mission in this age of rapidly evolving warfare and tumultuous geopolitics.
My whole purpose for any incarnation of this site is the same today as it has always been — to give readers more than what they get anywhere else. We dive deeper, offer uniquely relevant and timely analysis largely based on open-source intelligence, and make sure our readers walk away feeling they got something from their click that they couldn't get at another site. We also do this at warp speed, making our content relevant to the ever-accelerating news cycle.
Nowhere can this be seen more than in our rolling coverage of major defense-related events and global conflicts. We have been in near-daily rolling update coverage on the conflict in Ukraine for two years. If you told me we could pull this off two years ago, I would have said it's impossible. But thanks to this incredible team, we made it happen.
We always do.
The scale of what we do and who we reach is now truly humbling. What started close to a decade and a half ago as a rebuke of the 'soundbite culture' infesting the media at the time, and to fill a glaring need for deeper content aimed at the nexus between defense technology, foreign policy, and strategy, has now blossomed into something beyond what I thought was possible. The War Zone, now TWZ, hosts many millions of readers a month, making it one of the largest defense sites on the planet, and we have done this as a backwater to an automotive site. I can't wait to see what we can do with a proper platform of our own.
That being said, I want to wish the absolute best to our friends and colleagues over at thedrive.com, and give special thanks to its editor, Kyle Cheromcha, for the great cooperation over the years.
With the new site and URL (the old one still works, it will just forward you to TWZ.com) we finally have full navigation available to our readers based on an intricate site map that will grow and evolve over time. The navigation itself will expand in the future, offering granular browsing with just a few clicks of a mouse. Beyond that, we look forward to expanding our editorial team and stepping into the realm of video in the near future.
That's right, we are launching a TWZ YouTube channel, and just like how The War Zone has always been and will always be, it will be experimental in nature and will likely morph in exciting ways over time. The first video should drop relatively soon and it will be so great to learn what viewers like and how we can inject our unique content and voice into the YouTube ecosystem.
As I just noted, TWZ will always be experimental. It will never be 'finished.' We will never be comfortable and follow an easy path. The site will always be a work in progress and a place for innovation. Finally getting our own site is the first step to what will be many other leaps in the weeks, months, and years to come.
Above all else, while other outlets, and this industry as a whole, sadly seem to be shrinking at an alarming rate, we are growing and getting the opportunity to reach new audiences. That is, above all else, a testament to our incredibly loyal readership.
A fun fact that I have never really highlighted before, but which I feel is important for this letter, is that nearly half of TWZ's entire audience of many millions of page views a month come direct. In other words, they don't come from referrers, such as Google or social media sites — they come directly to our homepage. This is unheard of elsewhere and it's probably the thing I am most proud of.
This quality of loyal readership is so rare and it manifests itself every day in our unicorn of a comments section, many users of which have been with me for many years. It's just incredible. I feel so lucky every time I scroll down to the bottom of our posts and see the vibrant, thoughtful, funny, and insightful community we have all built.
There is no way I can thank you all enough for your support over the years. Having such a wonderful audience is truly the highlight of my career.
Now, welcome to TWZ.com!
Tyler Rogoway
Editor-In-Chief
TWZ.com
