Dear C4SS supporters,

Keeping track of my submissions of C4SS commentaries to newspapers is easy — I just add up the totals as I go and report them at the end of the week. Last Friday, I ginned up additional email accounts (with their own daily “send limits”) so that I could boost our submission capabilities. As a result, I’ve been able to send out more — exactly 8,600 discrete submissions to 2,423 newspapers in the US, Canada and Australia between then and now. Next week, I intend to begin working England, Scotland and Ireland into the mix.

Keeping track of what gets published out there is more difficult. Unless a newspaper contacts me for more information or to let me know they’ve decided to run one of our pieces, I rely primarily on Google News. I punch in obvious key terms like “C4SS,” “Center for a Stateless Society,” our authors’ names and article titles, etc.

Does that mean I catch all of the C4SS “pickups?” I don’t know, and I can’t report what I don’t know. Hopefully there are C4SS reprints out there that I don’t know about, and hopefully I’ll get better at finding them.

This week, I’m only aware of one C4SS publication in the “mainstream media” — the Woodstock, Ontario Sentinel-Review published Kevin Carson’s “Cultural Authoritarianism Breeds Political Authoritarianism.”

I’m also informed by the Providence, Rhode Island Journal — one of the top 100 US newspapers by circulation, with more than 100,000 readers — that they’ll be publishing my “Electronic Cigarettes and the Fog of (Class) War” tomorrow. Normally I’d wait to report that until it had actually happened, but I’m kind of excited about it, and besides, I hate to report only one “pickup” this week.

As you may have noticed, both of those pieces were submitted last week and only slated for publication late this week … a 7-14 day lag seems to be the pattern. Hopefully that means we’ve got a noticeable swell in op-ed acceptances/publications “in the pipe” for week after next with this week’s increased submissions volume.

In the “behind the scenes’ part of things, we’ve got an “exclusive” submission (by Darian Worden) in with a major newspaper. It shipped yesterday and we should know by Tuesday whether or not they’ll run it. If so, we’ll reach more than 600,000 readers. If not, it will appear on the C4SS site and go out by mass submission.

On the Intertubes, we continue to reach audiences through outstanding venues like InfoShop News and Daily Anarchist, and to publish via “open” outlets such as AlterNet and Open Salon.

Unfortunately, our Google News presence continues to slide, with fewer C4SS commentaries making their index. I’ve been working on some solutions for that and will be consulting with Brad Spangler on how to implement them over the next few days.

Finally, don’t forget this weekend’s “Op-Ed Boot Camp.” If you’ve ever thought of writing an op-ed or letter to the editor but weren’t sure how to go about it, now’s the time to get your rant on. See you there!

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