Dear C4SS supporters,

Brief media recap of the week:

– On Monday, C4SS director Brad Spangler appeared on Freedom Rings Radio.

– Yesterday my recent C4SS column “Awake O Zion” appeared in the weekly St. Joseph Telegraph.

– Update, 06/26 I just noticed that Darian Worden’s commentary “Who would maintain roads worse than the state?” published at C4SS on June 22nd, appeared in the Oxford Review — a Canadian paper published out of Woodstock, Ontario — on June 24th!

– I’m continuing to work on developing external newspaper “have your own blog” presences for C4SS, but the pick of the litter remains AlterNet. Of ten Google News mentions of C4SS at present, nine are due to the AlterNet presence.

– Speaking of Google News, we’re up against some tough competition this week for mindshare on search terms like “anarchy,” “anarchist” and “anarchism,” due to the G20 protests in Toronto and some buzz around the FX cable series “Sons of Anarchy.” I don’t know if we’re holding our own yet, but we’re certainly representing. Among other things, a Google News search on “anarchism” pulls up a front-page result for new C4SS advisory board member J. Neil Schulman’s fantastic essay “Mere Anarchy.”

– Our effort to get C4SS director Brad Spangler a guest slot on the Fox News show “Freedom Watch” has now amassed more than 1000 supporter votes. He’s in 11th place among hundreds of suggested guests. If you haven’t voted yet, please do so! When you register, you get ten votes, up to three of which can be cast for any particular suggested guest. Other C4SS-related potential guests you might want to support include Roderick Long, Wendy McElroy, Sheldon Richman and J. Neil Schulman.

– From the “I can’t go into the details until it floats or sinks” file: With the assistance of one of C4SS’s advisors and participation commitments from several people within and without the Center, I’ve managed to get a “panel” proposal in front of the producer of a major cable talk show. If it happens, it will be big. If it doesn’t happen, well, it won’t be big.

– Media lists, media lists, media lists! I’ve completed the Canadian list, which I was using as an experiment/model to teach myself how to get it right.

At present (after culling bad addresses, honoring removal requests, etc.), the Canadian list includes 330 newspapers. My initial US newspaper list had about 200 papers. I’m using that list while I build the bigger, better one — 114 newspapers so far, and I’ve only covered three states. These lists are broken down by state/province, and in the US by region. I’ll probably also do some city/metro sub-lists as well.

Here’s the thing about media lists:

If I send everything to everyone, the vast majority of editors are going to quickly either ask to be removed from our distributions — or, more likely, just ignore or filter C4SS material without ever looking at it or talking to us.

Targeting is key, and I’m trying to get as good at it as I can, as quickly as I can. Even with incomplete lists, for example, I was able to send Darian Worden’s latest commentary, “Rolling Back Prices at the Paris Metro,” to a select list of papers likely to be located in cities with mass transit systems (that being the news hook the piece was centered around). That was a quick and dirty targeting selection (“Top 100 US Op-Ed Pages,” plus my list of papers in Ontario, as Toronto has a subway system); as I build the lists I’ll be able to target to an increasingly fine degree of granularity, matching material with the papers most likely to appreciate and print it.

Which, folks, is a roundabout way of saying that I’m still spending a lot of my time looking up newspapers, finding their contact info, and pasting into my contacts forms. “Throw a lot of [expletive] at the wall and hope some sticks” is a good starting point, but I’m trying to make it possible to narrow down which sections of the wall particular kinds of [expletive] stick to best. Which pretty means that right now it’s a [expletive]ty job but someone has to do it, and that someone is me 😉

And that’s the media coordinator update for the week of June 25th. Have a great weekend!

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