On Record – March 2009

“You’re driving like an old lady. Push it.”
The frustration of my trainer was evident – my timid operation was hardly showcasing the capabilities of the product that had been his team’s baby for more than two years. I was behind the wheel of JCB’s military-spec HMEE, or High Mobility Engineer Excavator, capable of going 60 mph. And I was barely going 35.

Despite my soft-footed performance, it was still a joyride. Interesting story, too. HMEEs, designed to be part of a military convoy, started arriving in Iraq and Afghanistan this past fall. The bulked-up 200-horsepower backhoe, weighing more than 35,000 pounds with armor, has an ABS braking system and blackout capabilities for night operation.
It’s a story any gearhead would delve into.

When you edit, however, a major part of your job is to decide what does and does not get into the magazine’s pages. For Equipment World, the over-riding factor in this decision is giving our readers the information they need to increase their on-the-job productivity. With that mantra and quite frankly, in a market crunch that gives us fewer editorial pages, stories like the one above would have a slim chance of appearing in the magazine.

But it’s exactly the kind of story that would receive play on our new blog, http://constructionpundit.equipmentworld.com. Here, we have the freedom to post whatever we think would catch your fancy. As Tom Jackson, our executive editor who spearheaded the blog puts it, it’s like sitting down with EW’s editors and having a free-flowing discussion. We’ll start each post with a short intro – usually something that explains why we think a story is interesting – then link you the meat of a story. You’ll be able to react to any story we post, and perhaps develop an ongoing discussion with others who also have an opinion – whether it be loved it/ hated it/completely agree/thought it was stupid.
This blog will also serve as our reporting mechanism from the trade show floor. You’ll know immediately if we see something we think you should know about, since Constructionpundit is updated throughout the work day.

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Constructionpundit embraces what we call our Construction Media Group, which in addition to EW includes Total Landscape Care, Better Roads and Aggregates Manager magazines. This means each publication’s specialty – earthmoving, commercial and heavy construction, landscaping, road and bridge building, aggregate operations, etc. – will get blog coverage. It also means that you’ll have access to stories that may not involve your main business, but still could offer valuable information, even entertainment.

And entertainment is a key concept behind this blog. When you add Constructionpundit to your favorites list, we want you to do it with a smile.