Dear C4SS Supporters,
Whew — what a week! Some guy wiped out in his truck yesterday, taking out a utility pole, and with it my Internet access for 16 hours. That bollocksed up my “search for C4SS media pickups” routine, so I may have missed some; it also cost me a day’s worth of email capacity for submitting the Center’s op-eds.
The week’s stats in brief: 8,963 op-ed submissions to 2,835 publications; eight “pickups” (including a couple that I missed from last week):
- Kevin Carson’s “Libya: A Pig in a Poke?” — which had a number of pickups last week as well — appeared in the Baltic Review on April 14, the Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age on April 16, and the Seoul, Republic of Korea JoongAng Ilbo on April 19.
- My own “Hard Money, Hard Time” appeared in the Batesville, Arkansas Daily Guard on April 11.
- David D’Amato had four pickups of separate pieces: “The Drug War: Growing the Green” in the Carroll County, Maryland Standard on April 14; “International Crime Syndicate Targets Libya” in the Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age on April 18; “The Noble Lie: Meritocracy in the Middle East” in Urban Tulsa Weekly on April 20; and “The State’s Money Trees,” date unknown (it popped up in Google, having previously gone undetected by me) in the Dimpaur, India Morung Express.
Speaking of pickups: As you can see from these weekly updates, we have some “regulars,” we’re making some nice inroads in various international media markets … but we’re just not making a lot of progress on getting C4SS content into more local American newspapers. I think we can change that, with your help. Here’s a quick “action plan” for those who’d like to promote market anarchist media outreach:
- I currently submit op-eds to more than 1,800 US newspapers, so there’s a good chance that your local paper is on that list. Find out by emailing me and asking.
- If your paper is on my list, the next step is for you to contact the opinion editor and politely request that he or she start running C4SS material. Let me emphasize “politely.” Make sure they know the content is free. Ask them to have a look at our submissions. Make sure they know the content is free. Tell them that they’ll be getting unique perspectives that their readers have probably never considered before. And lest I forget, make sure they know the content is free.
- If your paper is not on my list, I can certainly put it there. Then you can go back to that last step and have your talk with the opinion editor.
It helps, of course, if you’re a paying subscriber to the paper we’re talking about, or if you can at least truthfully say that you pick up a copy every morning at the convenience store on your way to work. If you’re an advertiser, of course, you’re in a really good position to say “hey, there’s something I’d like to see in the paper.”
If this is something you’re comfortable doing, have at it, and thanks in advance!
Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society
PS: As you can see in the right sidebar of the C4SS site, our second quarter 2011 fundraiser is under way. Per my usual custom, I’ve made a donation that corresponds $100 per month of my pay here. My last “paycheck” was for half a month (January), so I’ve donated $20 in cash and $30 in-kind (renewal of service on the cell phone that C4SS’s number rings at) for a total of $50. If you like “match me!” contribution pitches, there you go.
