Dear C4SS Supporters,

For reasons that the numbers will make obvious, we decided to skip a week on the media coordinator update. Our submissions were down, and our pickups were … well, non-existent.

Now our submissions are back up (14,430 submissions to 2,762 publications in the last two weeks, weighted toward the end of the period), and I have at least one pickup to report (my “Election 2012: The Banality of Hyperbole” runs in today’s edition of Counterpunch).

The reasons for the drop-offs in both submissions and pickups are explicable and correctable:

We’ve had fewer submissions because we’ve had fewer authors regularly submitting content and because our content has been mostly “US-centric” (i.e. not submittable to newspapers worldwide).

We’ve had fewer pickups because of the aforementioned US-centrism, because our pieces have been running longer (for every 50 words over 500 in length, we exceed the length guidelines of, probably, 100 newspapers), and because we’ve become a little lax in the area of hanging our pieces on the popular “news hooks” that make them relevant and timely.

These are things we can fix. As a matter of fact, they’re things we are fixing right now.

So … have a great weekend, and I’ll be back next week with a (hopefully) more exciting report.

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