Dear C4SS supporters,
Hey, it’s my last media coordinator update of 2011 — and fortunately I have a pretty good week to share with you!
This week I’ve submitted 11,849 Center op-eds to 2,762 publications, scattered across all of Earth’s (non-sunken, not destroyed, etc.) continents. From that proliferation, I’ve detected 10 pickups, in seven publications, on two of those continents (North America and Asia) and in four countries, (Bangladesh, Canada, India and the United States), and in three US states (Florida, Massachusetts and New Mexico).
Like so:
- Kevin Carson’s “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” appeared in the London, Ontario Free Press on December 25, and in Florida’s Hernando Today … today!
- Goa, India’s O Heraldo published Kevin’s “Don’t Put a State Ceiling on Rents; Abolish the State Floor Under Them,” as “Rent ceiling: Abolish the state floor under them,” on December 26.
- Also on December 26, the Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age ran David D’Amato’s “Starvenomics in North Korea and Elsewhere.”
- Kevin’s “Deliver Occupy from its ‘Friends'” appeared in the Deming, New Mexico Headlight on December 27.
- Counterpunch ran Kevin’s “The Whole World is Watching” on December 28.
- David’s “A New Year of Global Protest” appeared in the Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age on December 28, and in Massachusetts’s South Coast Today (as “National View: Let 2012 stand for individuals against oppression”) on December 29.
- The Headlight published Darian Worden’s “A Fast and Furious String of Government Failures” on December 29.
- David’s “‘Systemic Risk’ for Profit” appeared in Hernando Today on December 29.
Instead of spreading reciprocal blogospheric link love this week, I’d like to focus my attention on one publication that runs a lot of the Center’s content: Infoshop News.
First and most obviously, I want to thank them for using our stuff.
Secondly, I’d like to publicly reconsider, and solicit comments on, my past practice of not treating Infoshop reprints as “mainstream media” pickups.
On the one hand, they’d probably be the first to dispute the “mainstream” classification — they’ve been independent and anarchist in both name and fact for close to 15 years now.
On the other hand, I’ve made past exceptions to the “MSM” criterion for sites that are 1) popular/well-trafficked, and 2) indexed in Google News — to wit, Counterpunch and Antiwar.com.
I don’t want to artificially or casually inflate our “pickup” statistics, but it seems to me that Infoshop meets my working definition of “MSM,” that being that its Google News indexing gets our stuff in front of quite a few “normal people” (as opposed to movement-affiliated) eyeballs. The simple fact is that even in “low pickup” weeks, when I hit the news search engines to look for us, I nearly always find Infoshop staring back at me.
So what do you guys think? Should the first media coordinator update of 2012 include Infoshop pickups in the statistics? Let me know in comments. And have a great weekend.
Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society
PS: Hit that fundraiser widget, folks. Daddy needs a new pair of shoes and so forth.
