We cataloged 58 “mainstream media pickups” of Center English-language op-eds (and several in translation!) in January, putting us on track to rack up more than 700 pickups in 2014 (assuming we can keep pace). That’s noteworthy, so I wanted to throw out a few thoughts on how we’re doing it:

• Before It’s News picks up nearly all of our material. We had an internal debate as to whether or not these pickups constitute “mainstream media,” and concluded that they do. BIN is a top 1,000 web site in the United States and top 2,000 worldwide, even if it doesn’t look “like most newspapers.” It has a real editorial policy and screens for newsworthiness, etc. as opposed to screening for particular ideology or whatever.
• For the last year or so, we’ve submitted selected C4SS op-eds to Counterpunch. They don’t pick up every submission we send them, but they do pick up quite a few. Once again, we discussed whether or not this constituted “mainstream media.” For me, the deciding factors were 1) that while nominally “left-wing,” Counterpunch is eclectically so, accepting material on current events from across a broad swath of the left-of-center spectrum (as opposed to being e.g. a partisan Democrat rag or a sectarian publication); and 2) that I’ve seen its print edition on “real meatspace newsstands” in the past.
• But aside from those two … debatable … publications, we’ve seen real “pickup” growth in the “regular” newspaper sector. In January, for example, C4SS material was picked up by daily print publications ranging from the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong’s leading English-language daily) to the Norwalk, Connecticut Hour and the Newberry, South Carolina Observer (small-town American dailies) to the Portland, Oregon Skanner (a black community daily). And, of course, many more.
• Over the past year, we’ve started building up a more robust international operation. I’ve always submitted the Center’s material to English-language publications worldwide, but now we’ve got a growing team of international media coordinators “by language,” translating the Center’s op-eds and submitting them to non-English-language newspapers. You’ll be hearing more about, and from, our international media coordinators as the year heats up.

You can keep track of our “MSM pickups” in the C4SS press room — and you can help make it possible for us to produce even more material and get it published in even more places by supporting the Center.

[Erratum Update: Above, I allude to one of our articles being picked up by the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading English-language daily, with a circulation of 104,000. The bad news is that while SCMP has run our material before, they didn’t this time. The good news is that the paper that did run David Grobgeld’s piece was Taiwan’s China Post, which has a circulation of about 400,000. The even better news is that we’ve already heard from them that they’re running another piece of ours tomorrow – TLK, 02/06/14]