Dear C4SS supporters,

Our rigorous schedule of submitting the Center’s commentaries to “mainstream media” is starting to bear fruit! More on those submissions in a moment, but first the good news: This week, I was able to verify ten media “pickups” of our op-eds, as well as one big newspaper link.

• The Chiefland, Florida Citizen ran David D’Amato’s “Mortgage Liens on our Lives” on 10/17 (it only turned up in search engine results this week).
• The Ruidoso, New Mexico News printed David D’Amato’s “QE2: The Fed’s Latest Scam” on 11/11 (once again, a pickup that we only detected a little later).
• Kevin Carson’s “Meet the New Boss” ran in the Des Moines, Iowa Free Press on 11/14.
• Le Quebecois Libre published Kevin’s “Kitchen Light Turned On, Cockroaches Object” on 11/15.
• The Portland, Oregon Skanner ran Kevin’s “Meet the New Boss” on 11/16.
• The Des Moines, Iowa Free Press published Kevin’s “The Power of Exit: Boycott Air Travel” on 11/16.
• Kevin’s “Citizens United — is the Gas Pedal Stuck?” ran in the Carlsbad, New Mexico Current-Argus on 11/17.
• My piece, “For TSA, Irresponsibility is Job One,” ran in the 11/18 edition of the St. Joseph, Missouri Telegraph.
• Two Canadian papers (under one roof, but apparently with separate editions), the Woodstock Sentinel-Review and the Oxford Review, ran David D’Amato’s “The Crime Families Meet in Korea” on 11/18.
• The Times of India linked to David D’Amato’s “Torture, the Great American Export” this morning.

You can keep track of our “pickups” as we do now, thanks to Mike Gogulski, our web admin. Mike developed the “Citation Manager” plugin to help us document this stuff, and that little gem in turn now produces and updates a “We Get Published” page in real time. I’ll still publish a weekly list, but now you don’t have to wait for it unless you want to.

Now, about those submissions: This week, I submitted 11,403 pieces of C4SS commentary to 2,645 publications on five continents.

I’ve been giving you those numbers each week for awhile now, and they’ve plateaued. Over the next few weeks, I expect to see them come down a little, then go back up.

They’ll come down because, in my opinion, we’re hitting American newspapers (1,882 of the 2,645 mentioned above) with too much stuff. When each of those newspapers gets five or six C4SS pieces a week, I start getting more “please remove us from your submissions list” requests, and I suspect that for every one of those, there’s another instance of a paper just putting us in their spam filter or otherwise ignoring our material. I aim to “normalize” submissions, starting now, so that each paper gets a maximum of two or three C4SS submissions each week.

They’ll come back up because I’m continuing to add newspapers to my worldwide lists, and because I’m asking C4SS’s writers to come up with more commentary that’s not “America-centric.” — stuff that I can submit in Mumbai, Melbourne, Mombasa, Madrid, Medellin … heck, if we come up with something relevant, McMurdo.

I’m letting you know this in advance so that you aren’t disappointed when you see submission numbers coming down a little bit for a little while.

By way of keeping all this going (and expanding it — we’re in the middle of launching BlackVanguard.Net!), let me call your attention to the Center’s current fundraiser.

By my quick count, the Center produced 34 “for general publication” op-eds (not including “exclusive” submissions for single newspapers) in October, and is on track to match or exceed that this month.

In October, I racked up more than 40,000 submissions of those commentaries to more than 2,600 newspapers worldwide. We’ll exceed that number this month as well.

The “pickups” of those pieces are still drifting in, but during October itself I counted only eight. We did better than that not just this month but this week. I hope and expect that this is a permanent uptick.

All that work does cost money. Computer/Internet infrastructure and hosting and tech support, and on and on and on. The writers get paid (not enough, but they get paid). I get paid. I won’t say I don’t get paid enough, and as a matter of fact, as usual, I’ll commit to donating some of my pay back to the Center, when I receive it — this month, a minimum of $60 (the cost of an annual BlackVanguard.Net membership) and probably more. We don’t eat much, but we do eat. So please, help out.

I hope to talk to many of you tonight in the opening conference call for this weekend’s Op-Ed Boot Camp. The rest of you, have a great weekend!

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