This picture has nothing to do with anything, but I figure that if you’re reading this, you’ll be glad I shared it. Via bbaltimore/Flickr

Hello dear readers, and greetings from London. It’s been ages since we’ve published one of these meta, letter-from-the-editor things that publications tend to write, and what better time than now?

I’m writing from the office of VICE UK, and didn’t come out here just to hang out with the drum ‘n’ bass division of Anonymous. You may have noticed a new byline around here lately: that of Vicki Turk, who’s just joined Motherboard as our UK editor. She’s a great reporter and editor formerly of Wired UK, and is already working on some excellent stories for us. We’re very excited to have her aboard.  Expect more coverage on the local tech scenes—as well as UK and ‘Murican spelling here and there—as well as more global stories about future-shaping tech and science trends. If you’re a local writer or have something to share, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Speaking of global, we’ve also hired Alejandro Tauber to be our Dutch editor and Max Hoppenstedt to helm our coverage in Berlin. Both are running their own language-specific sites, and have been producing killer editorial and video pieces that we’ve translated and subtitled into English. Most recently, check out Max’s piece on biohacker Tim Cannon and Alejandro’s look at DIY psychosis. Again, feel free drop ’em a line. 

Now, we can’t talk about growth without discussing our readers. We’ve seen our site audience grow more than sixfold this year, which has got all of us at Motherboard happy as digital clams. A heartfelt thanks to all of you who read, share, and engage with our stories, and thanks as well to all of you doing the same with our YouTube channel, which picked up around 100,000 subs in our first year actually trying to put things on there. Seriously, thanks to all of you.

So what’s next? Naturally, our goal is to continue growing and bringing deeper, more consistent coverage of the wide range of stories we’re covering now, as well as produce more longform and serialized video. We’ve also got some exciting partnerships in the works, the nearest of which is our support of investigative journalism outfit Muckrock’s 2013 Drone Census. In last year’s Drone Census, Muckrock’s FOIA expertise produced a wealth of new data about governmental drone use, and we’re stoked to begin publishing reportage around this year’s effort sometime in the next couple weeks.

To make our content easier to enjoy, we’re also working to freshen the website with a responsive design that will actually work on tablets and phones, as well as give us more flexibility in how we tell our stories. We’re early in the stages, and don’t have a target date yet (plus, sharing one is surely a jinx) but expect something early next year. And yes, we’re looking at a new comment system.

The TL;DR version of all this is that Motherboard is growing thanks your support, which means we can do even more of the work we love to do. I’m quite proud of what our team has produced so far, and I’m very excited to bring a boatload of new things into the world. I promise Skynet isn’t one of them.

@derektmead