Well, I feel kind of dumb. For some reason it completely escaped my notice that a month had ended and that it was time for me to post our English language media numbers for October (I finally noticed when I went to record a new submission to newspapers and saw that I still had last month’s sitting there in the text file I use for such things.
So, here we go:
In October, I made 31,534 submissions of op-eds to 2,597 publications worldwide. That number is lower than usual — we’ve been fairly regularly topping 40,000 monthly submissions — because content creation slowed down a little this month and because more of our content was US-centric instead of stuff I could submit as relevant worldwide. I expect we’ll be back above the 40k mark this month and next.
In October, I identified 47 “pickups” of C4SS material in English language publications worldwide including “mainstream media” and select high-readership/prestigious media. We’ve been running in the neighborhood of 50 pickups per month, so this number isn’t surprising. My goal for 2015 is to get us into the 100 pickups per month range.
Some highlights:
- Trevor Hultner’s “Paul Krugman: ‘Leave Obama Alone'” was our most popular piece with media — five pickups.
- David S. D’Amato’s “Blue or Red, They’re All About the Green” got us our first Utah pickup — the Price Sun Advocate.
- Carlos Clemente’s and Erick Vasconcelos’s work as our Spanish and Portuguese media coordinators is blowing my stat-keeping and goal-setting — I was hoping for 2,000 pickups by the end of the year, but our other-language pickups already have us coming up fast on 2,100. Fantastic work, Alan and Erick!
How are we doing? Well, I mostly focus on “external media” metrics, and I try to be a stern self-taskmaster. We continue to get market anarchist material published in mass media, but I want more, more, more. What I usually don’t pay a whole lot of attention to is how well we are known and how welcome we are in the American libertarian movement. But I have a couple of data points on that to share.
In late 2013, I attended the Students For Liberty southeast US regional conference at the University of Florida in Gainesville. C4SS Senior Fellow Charles Johnson, aka Rad Geek, ran an ALL Distro table to sell left-libertarian literature. The reception was friendly, but few people seemed to know who we were or what we were about.
On October 25th of this year, Charles and I were joined at the same event by C4SS Fellow Cory Massimino. Same kind of table, same kind of literature … but this time everyone seemed to know at least a little about C4SS / left-libertarianism / market anarchism, and most people seemed interested in finding out more (anecdotally it looked to me like we had one of the busiest tables there).
Also anecdotally, the right-libertarian response to C4SS specifically and left-libertarianism / market anarchism in general seems to have greatly increased in tempo over the past year. We’re finding ourselves engaged — both in terms of agreement and positive mention on one hand and disagreement/attacks on the other — far more frequently and by more and more prominent writers.
So, I think we’re accomplishing things on a number of fronts. And I appreciate your support for our work!
Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
English Language Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society
