Dear C4SS supporters,
A quick update on English language media for December:
- I made 33,437 submissions of C4SS op-eds last month, each submission to as many as 2,597 newspapers worldwide (some submissions, if they were only relevant to the US or to some particular locale, to fewer publications than that).
- I’ve identified 50 media pickups of our op-eds for November.
A couple high points:
- Our single most picked up piece in November was Kevin Carson’s “Surprise: The Drug War Isn’t About Drugs,” which appeared in seven “mainstream media” outlets.
- Kevin’s op-ed on the killing of Michael Brown — “State Justice Failed Michael Brown. People’s Justice is Just Getting Started.” — is already at four pickups and was only released on the 25th, so I expect some December reprints on that one.
- Also at four pickups and with some likely December mojo is Grant Mincy’s piece on the coal economy in Appalachia, “Wild, Wonderful and Free.” Two of those pickups were from West Virginia newspapers, meaning the piece is actually hitting home in the locale it addresses.
As of two years ago, my standard for a “successful” month within the Center’s op-ed program was 20 “pickups” — one each weekday in a 30-day month. Lately, that standard has been 50 pickups per month, for several reasons.
One reason is that Before It’s News, a popular aggregation site, picks up most of our material. We had an internal discussion as to whether or not to count those pickups since BIN is an aggregator; we came down on the side of counting them because BIN is an extremely popular site that gets us lots of exposure … exposure worth including in our counts. It regularly ranks in the top 3,000 sites on the Internet per Alexa and its demographics indicate a very broad reader spectrum that qualifies it as “mainstream” in audience. So while there’s a certain “inflationary” effect, it’s not a false effect.
Another reason for raising the bar, of course, is that we expect, want and strive to get better and better at placing our op-eds in newspapers. And in my opinion we are meeting that expectation. Even two years ago, we were lucky to get the occasional pickup in a weekly community newspaper (we loved, and still love, that market, by the way).
These days it’s not at all unusual for our stuff to show up in small town dailies from coast to coast in the US, with occasional penetration into international markets that we had no expectation of getting into back then — Barbados, Jamaica, Fiji and Taiwan are four that come immediately to mind over the last few months.
My new goal, which I have no expectation of making next month but every expectation of making next year, is the 100-pickup month.
I see no reason why we can’t average two pickups per day by “regular daily newspapers” in addition to 40 BIN reprints, left/political media pickups and US/international market/topic-specific “occasionals.”
That’s the next prize. But, and you knew I was going to say this, winning that prize means continuing to ask for, and get, your support. The US Thanksgiving holiday being fresh in memory, let me take this opportunity to thank all of you who have helped make our work effective, and those who will do so in the future.
Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
English Language Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society
