Dear C4SS supporters,

The quick stats: 8,790 discrete submissions of C4SS commentaries to 2,671 publications this week. That’s more submissions to more publications than ever before. I’m building a media list for the United Kingdom at the moment; English newspapers started receiving C4SS content for the first time on Wednesday.

The bad news: So far, I’ve found not a single print media “pickup” of a C4SS commentary piece this week. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any, but if there were I haven’t found them yet. The Providence, Rhode Island Journal indicated that it would be publishing my Electronic Cigarettes and the Fog of (Class) War” last Saturday. If so, it was only in their print edition and did not appear on the web.

We’ve been averaging a couple of “mainstream print media” pickups a week. What happened? I don’t know. Hopefully this week is a temporary “blip” or “burp” and things will pick back up and accelerate upward next week, but I have a theory to the contrary, and it goes like this:

While we are now submitting commentary to newspapers around the world, our largest “media market” is the US. With less than a month remaining before a nationwide general election, it may be that the US print media are focusing more on candidates and elections, to the exclusion of other political material. That’s just a theory. We won’t really know if it holds water unless things remain slow through November 2nd and then pick back up. Obviously I hope that I’m wrong and that we don’t have to wait that long to see better results.

The not-so-bad news: I’m starting to see blurbs of, and links to, C4SS pieces at some “mainstream media” sites. This week, I noticed such blurbs/links at the web sites of the Times of India and Columbia, South Carolina’s WLTX TV.

We’re also starting to see more “name checking” — of the friendly and unfriendly variety — from other policy institutes and think tanks. Chris Fitzsimon, author of the North Carolina Justice Center’s “Policy Watch,” observed that our mission statement “is not an Onion headline.” Edward Miller cites the work of C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson at the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies.

So, it’s not all doom and gloom. If our “grasp” (as measured by our submissions being accepted for publication) is a bit weaker than usual at the moment, our “reach” continues to get longer and longer (over the next week or so, the United Kingdom list will grow quite a bit; after that, I plan to split my list-building time between continental Europe, Africa and South America for awhile) and we’re become a more substantial part of the continuing political “background noise” that shapes opinion less overtly by serving as an occasionally acknowledged resource for opinion-makers. We’re about to take some bolder steps into “social media” as Stacy Litz, whom you’ll recognize as one of our news analysts, starts coordinating that end of things.

Unlike US President Barack Obama, I’m not going to blame the Center’s supporters and allies for the week’s disappointments and demand that you “buck up.” But please do stick with us. We’re still just getting started on our goal of WORLD MEDIA DOMINATION, and if progress is slow, it’s also real.

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