It's so much easier to write for a person in your life than to write for some imagined readership, so you write something that's more intimate and true.
Some are focused on social, some on growing readerships, some on paywalls.
Lesbian titles were especially popular, crossing over to a straight-male readership (some things, it seems, never change).
Transplanting weapons and concepts to which 21st-century kids are well accustomed into earlier contexts, where they appear suddenly and dangerously new, Ben Jeapes, Scott Westerfeld and Ellen Renner ask a youthful readership some searching questions about the ethics of experimentation.
For example: "If Martin Luther King were alive today, would he be doing his fair share of the housework?" - You'll need to accept some of the readership will not recognise your column as the best thing in the newspaper, even though it plainly is, and also that you will receive comments along the lines of: "I hope you die".
This had less to do with its famous long-winded prose, then with the fact that it was a supplement delivered with the Sunday Times, and therefore read at nearly the same moment on Sunday morning by the Times readership – some of the most influential people in America, in attentive repose.
There was some variation in readership across sub-specialties with urologists reading the least (mode 3, with 35% reading 3 or less journals and 3% reading 10+ journals) and oral and maxillofacial surgeons reading the most (bimodal 4 and 6, 9% reading 3 or less journals and 13% reading 10+ journals).
And cursing all of a sudden when you've never done so before will lose some of your readership.
In some cases this loss of trust has led to a loss of readership, for some is was more temporary anger - "I punched a cushion"- and for others it's a change in perception - "Filed Guardian under corporate machine that employees naïve hipsters".
