Dear C4SS supporters,

As I’ve been doing, I’ll go into the details of how I’m approaching the position of C4SS media coordinator some more below, but first the week’s high points:

– The Center has had two newspaper column “pickups” that I know of in the last week, both by the St. Joseph [Missouri] Telegraph, a weekly print newspaper published by long-time “left-libertarian” Mike Bozarth.

– Our “outside” blog at AlterNet continues to produce Google News mentions. Those stories are indexed on a “rolling” 30-day basis. Right now we’re at six, up from one at the beginning of the month. That number should continue to rise, but more important than the number of mentions is where they turn up — we appear on the first page of Google News searches for “anarchy,” “anarchism” and “anarchist(s).”

– One radio — “real” radio, not podcast — booking this week, for next week: C4SS director Brad Spangler joins host Kenneth John on Freedom Rings Radio next Monday morning.

– As I write this, our campaign to put Brad on “Freedom Watch,” a Fox News “smaller government” show, has received 722 votes and is in 16th place out of a field of hundreds of suggested guests. So far 249 of you have voted for Brad (you can cast up to three votes per suggested guest) … if you haven’t voted yet, please do!

Those are the successes this week that I know of. There may be more.

For example, I happen to read the St. Joseph Telegraph, and Mike let me know that he was running our columns. If not for that, I’d never have known, because the Telegraph is a print paper. Its electronic edition is PDF, not HTML, so it isn’t indexed in Google News and such.

As a second example, I’m submitting some C4SS articles to non-English-language papers (e.g. Darian Worden’s “Bigotry Bound with State Power” went out to several Russian-language publications in Kyrgyzstan). If they are published in translation with no link to c4ss.org, I may never know about them. Ditto if they’re published only on paper. I’ll try to detect all uses of C4SS material, but I may miss some. If you happen to come across one I haven’t mentioned, let me know!

The area of non-English language submissions seems like a good place to segue into “media strategy” matters.

I’m still hard at work building media lists. I’m doing so as a matter of normal everyday activity — I’m at about 300 Canadian newspapers now and expect to finish up at 350-400 in the next few days, after which I’ll be coming back to build a larger US list — and I’m also doing so on a case-by-case basis where there seems to be a natural geographic focus.

Darian’s last piece went out to papers in Kyrgyzstan because it addressed a topic of specific interest there. His latest, “Direct Action is Key,” went out to a list I built on the spot of papers in the Florida Keys (that list will, in turn, be aggregated into a larger Florida list, which will be aggregated into the ginormous US list).

So, I’m building big (national) lists, made up of smaller (state/province) lists, made up at least sometimes of even smaller regional or interest-based lists. Before the end of the month, I expect to have more than 1,000 media contacts, organized such that I can do general, global op-ed submissions; focused, local op-ed submissions; and everything in between, all with a few clicks of the mouse.

My off-the-cuff estimate is that this week I’ve dropped more than 1,000 C4SS op-ed submissions into editors’ inboxes (obviously some editors have received more than one article for consideration). By the time my list-building project gets “done,” i.e. to a point where it’s maintained with the occasional addition of a new paper or deletion of a bad address rather than through hours of tracking down email addresses en masse — I expect to be hitting more than 2,000 editors with a total of 5,000+ submissions per week.

That’s not counting bloggers, who are going to start getting a bigger share of my attention in the near future. If you blog, I hope you’re already aware that all of C4SS’s content is yours to reproduce/reprint free of charge. Help yourself! I’ll be assembling a list of pro-freedom blogs and evangelizing on behalf of our FREE CONTENT starting real soon now, so that those who haven’t heard, hear.

And that’s what’s going on this week at the C4SS media coordinator’s desk. Thanks for reading, thanks for supporting the Center’s work, and thanks for the opportunity to be part of this great project.

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society