The last thing a worker wants to report after only two weeks on the job is “not much going on around here.” Fortunately, I don’t have to report that — but I do have to explain why what’s going on around here isn’t always very visible yet.

Let me start with the visible stuff:

– This week I booked, and C4SS director Brad Spangler fulfilled, one “Internet radio” appearance for the Center: Standing For Liberty with Phil Wolf.

– This week the center set up and began publishing its commentaries to, “open blogs” on three large Internet media presences: AlterNet, Salon and The Indianapolis Star. One immediate effect of doing this is that C4SS material is now showing up on Google News. I hope to eventually get the Center’s site directly indexed on Google News, but any penetration there is a good thing for the market anarchist message.

– On Wednesday, I created a campaign to put a C4SS guest on “Freedom Watch,” a “smaller-government” cable news program which accepts guest suggestions and takes votes on them. Mariana Evica, the Center’s social media specialist, is promoting that campaign. I suspect it will be successful, and hope you’ll participate.

Now to the less visible stuff:

– I’ve got C4SS guest proposals in to numerous (double-digits numerous) radio and “Internet radio” shows. Some of those proposals have moved beyond the proposal point to “let’s make this happen … now when?” and such. Others I have yet to receive replies to.

– I’ve been building media lists and submitting C4SS material to the publications on those lists as op-eds. I started off with a nice base of purchased lists (“Top 100 US Op-Ed Pages” and so forth). I’ve been been manually building larger lists. At this time, I’ve got about 200 US newspapers, 50 Canadian newspapers, all the English-language papers in Israel and the non-Israeli Middle East, Mexico and Jamaica. And so on and so forth. My aim is to push “general” C4SS commentaries out to a lot of prospective publishers, while also being able to target more geographically focused pieces to papers in the areas where they’re most likely to be read.

– I’ve also been maintaining the media lists I’m building. When an address turns out to be bad, I purge it. When an editor asks to be removed from our distribution list, I comply. When a paper replies that they accept only “exclusives,” I move them to a list of papers with that policy (in the near future, we may submit some “exclusives” that aren’t first published on the C4SS site, to see if we can reach the audiences involved).

I’m essentially building a bigger and bigger haystack as the days go by, then going through that haystack with every op-ed submission looking for new needles. The good news is that there are almost certainly some needles in there … but they may not out themselves as needles until the fifth, fiftieth or even five hundredth submission they receive. The better news is that even as the haystack gets bigger, going through it continues to take about the same amount of time (it takes no longer to send an op-ed to 200 papers than it does to 20, or to two).

Naturally I had hoped to be able to report huge visible results by the end of my second week on the job as media coordinator — several published op-eds, a couple of “real” radio appearances, maybe a TV guest shot.

That didn’t happen this week. It may not happen next week. But it will happen. Thanks for your support for the Center, and I’ll be back next week to let you know what I’m up to and how things are going.

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