Dear C4SS supporters,

Welcome to my final media coordinator report. Not THE last media coordinator report, just MY last media coordinator report. After not quite five years in this position, I’ve decided it’s time to move on (amicably — I remain a senior fellow at the Center and an advisor at our parent organization, the Molinari Institute). It’s been a pleasure working with all of my comrades at the Center and for all of you who support our efforts. Thank you for a wonderful and rewarding experience!

And, of course, congratulations to my successor in the position, Trevor Hultner, who has spent most of this last month getting up to speed on the various tasks involved. When the C4SS phone rings now, it’s Trevor who answers it. He’s been handling final editing/proofing of our op-eds for a couple of weeks and took over submissions yesterday. I know you’ll treat him as well as you’ve treated me.

Because of the overlap involved in a change of this kind, and because I messed up a text file I’ve maintained, this month’s figures are a little fragmented.

For example, I know that I’ve made 35,529 submissions of Center op-eds to 2,578 publications worldwide this month — but that figure is low because Trevor has made and/or will today make, several thousand more. The real total for March will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 submissions.

I also know that I identified and logged AT LEAST 50 pickups of C4SS material and three mentions/quotes/cites of C4SS material this month.

I can’t blame Trevor or the changeover for the vagueness of that number. I apparently forgot to hit “save” the other day on the text file I use as a counting tool. I know this because the three mentions/quotes/cites I found aren’t there, even though I typed them in. There may be some missing pickups as well, but 50 is the number showing and the number I’m certain of.

The reason I have always kept a running log of pickups/mentions is that tracking this stuff is a sort of “rolling” thing. A piece that gets published and submitted on February 25th might well not be picked up until February 28th and might not show up in the search engines and get noticed and logged into the press room page by me or my successor until March 8th. So I can’t just go back to the press room and grab a number for a given month. The pickups are all logged there with publication date, not the date they were found. Sorry about that.

Anyway — around 40k submissions this month, and more than 50 pickups/mentions this month. Not bad! As always, I hope and expect that number to increase over time … but as of the moment I hit “publish” on this report, that’s out of my hands and in the (capable) hands of others. Once again, it has been a privilege to work with and for all of you.

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Senior Fellow
Center for a Stateless Society