Tim

Now...if I were to ask how many hours last week each of us dedicated to putting our stories on the desk of news editors--what do you think the answer would be?

Exactly.  Zilch.

My solution would be to establish some kind of liberal blog consortium press office--that spent 100% of its time working on getting stories onto the desks of major news editors, in both local and national markets.

If we do that, this problem would be solved in a week.

(thanks for this post, by the the way. very interesting topic)

This is a GREAT point.

#1) please cross post this on dailykos

#2) jeff's idea about a progressive story pushing service sounds great ( although i bet it would take more than a week to solve the problem )

One thing that we could do to help AAR is what a group of women in Baton Rouge did a few months ago.  They got together, talked to the station manager of a local station that was doing poorly, and convinced him that switching formats to AAR would be good business and that the market exists.  To prove there was a market, these 6 women went out and gathered 1500 signatures for the station manager, and then the station switched to AAR.

This is exactly the type of thing that a group of dedicated activists could manage for their local area.  I plan to do this next semester with my Democracy for America group on campus here in Champaign-Urbana, IL.  I urge others to follow suit.

For more information about how to go about doing this, check out these two diaries on DailyKos:
The Air America Recipie
Calling Baton Rouge: A Kossack's Insider Guide to Radio

The question is why it's not here already. There's a huge market for disaffected Democrats and independents - still the MSM try to imitate Faux News whenever they get the chance. Perhaps they are concerned more about indoctrinating people than in making profits? But for how long? Where are George Soros and the other liberal billionaires?

It took the cons 30+ years to build their machine, don't forget. US liberals have probably been the worst incompetents in marketing, organisation and controlling national discourse that this world has ever seen. We even let them demonize the word "liberal". We say "fiscal conservatism" instead of "fiscal responsisbility" and we claim that W is not a real conservative. Fuck that. He is a conservative and this is conservatism: greed, prejudice, cruelty and ignorance.

Let's build a national movement against conservatism - if the Canadians and the Europeans could do it, than we can do it too.

Thanks for the laugh.

I agree with Jeff. We should have an organized entity that's focused on daily press releases to the over 1,000 MSM outlets across america. With modern technology, this same stratey is rapidly implemented by highly successful small & medium size business across the country.

With the birth of email, one click sends a press release to thousands of MSM outlets from across the country.

Based on the track record of small businesses, it is not uncommon for a " Good Story" to get picked-up by 10%-20% of your media targeted by email.

I cannot think of a better alternative of quickly gaining MSM attention than by implementing this organized strategy.

Since you are dealing with competing individual MSM editors & journalists, a " Good & Worthy" Story hitting their desks thru email WILL NOT be Ignored.

Its all about the " Numbers Game".

You see the problem don't you?

I think liberal blogosphere needs to concentrate on building audience instead.

Over at Seeing the Forest I suggested creating a foundation called "Liberally Endowed" which would collect small donations into one big pot to be divided by a group of liberal bloggers.

I've seen a couple of occasions where my little blog on Indiana politics was necessarily the inspiration for a story that appeared in a couple of the Indiana newspapers. I've suspected it on a few other occasions. And I know that local political reporters are reading my blog. But they haven't mentioned me by name in these stories.

I'm not sure how you measure the influence, but I think progressive blogs are a good way to prevent well-funded conservatives from dominating the discourse. Even if the mainstream media isn't mentioning the progressive blog by name, I suspect many reporters are reading these blogs and becoming aware of contrary viewpoints. Perhaps these viewpoints clue the reporters in to what sorts of questions to ask or when not to believe something coming from a conservative source.

1. The blogosphere is a guerrilla effort. To try to get the MSM to acknowledge the blogosphere is like trying too hard to get the class bully to notice you. The harder you try, the more you work against your cause, conceding the POWER to the bully to acknowledge you, to recognize you, to make you a someone.

2. Why does the blogosphere need to be recognized by the MSM, a house of cards that is rapidly rendering itself irrelevant and a joke?

3. Seems as though when guerrilla efforts go mainstream, they lose their fire in the belly. Witness moveon; witness Woodward.

4. I want to be informed, which I am by the blogosphere. What I find lacking and what I believe the progressive bloggers could do to strengthen and gain ground: Blog writers should give the reader a link to a way they can take action on any particular issue being discussed. Often, all I read is well-deserved spewing of anger. But after reading the spew, I'd like to know who to irritate to make a difference. Often, I research for hours, until I find where I should make commotion. Then I compose a concise e-mail with a call to action and e-mail links and send it to my mailing list. I think if the blogs did this with every issue: gave a call to action, a link, and a command to "send this to at least 10 people you know," the guerrillas would win while the MSM fiddled.

It's not an honest game. They don't like us. They aren't going to give us a voice, no matter what we say. We ought to realize it going in.  That doesn't mean that we can't play the game and win; just that we certainly aren't going to win if we pretend it's an honest game.

I love some of the suggestions in this thread. We should indeed make sure that every major media outlet hears from progressive blogs every day. We also ought to sue them; not to win, but to make news from the repeated claim that they are indeed biased, and to keep the pressure on.

bb

I mean, I sense a "sea change" in the  attitude of the media over the past year.  I think that they all read the Blogs but don't acknowledge they do.  It is like mental masturbation, it can't help but influence how folks see things.

And it is free grist for their mill.  Free research.  Free words and thoughts, when you deal in words and thoughts,  have a big influence.

I have made my living doing media relations at various times and I can tell you with certainty that the accusation that the media is lazy is pretty accurate.  An agency that placed the important stories in their email and on their desks would be worth its weight in gold.

Email: [username]@gmail.com

Repeated. Many times. Funded by a liberal sugar daddy who's prepared to lose $10 million a year (because that's what the Post & WashTimes lose) to get his message into public discourse.

Heck, I'd edit the darn thing for a low salary (I'd like to be the left's Robert Bartley) if someone'd only fund it. Any takers?

Also, bloggers actually appearing in the MSM would help. It seems whenever I watch CNN or MSNBC, most of the bloggers that are brought on are conservatives. (I think I've seen Matt on TV, but few other lefties.)

Why don't Kos, Armando, Chris, etc. ever appear on these shows? I can't believe they're not being asked (especially in the case of Markos, who runs the most widely read political blog on the planet.)

For one, as was mentioned above, just in terms of time-span, they have a 30-year lead. During that time, their efforts to neocon the media have been tremendous and have produced really blatant results. With this has come a power that they will not relinquish easily. But more importantly, at the heart of this subversion of the media into a uniform mega voice lies a mission. As Thom Hartmann said: "Trillions are at stake in this transformation of America from its founding ideal of government of, by, and for We, The People, into a neo-feudal state ruled by corporate-CEOs-turned-politicians and operated on the ancient but corrupt principle of crony capitalism and rule-by-the-rich."

Certainly at this point, there is no one on the radar screen that looks remotely capable of countering such force, definitely not without money, and even more money! Through the 1990s, writes Robert Parry, "the conservatives poured billions of dollars into their media apparatus, which rose like a vertically integrated machine incorporating newspapers, magazines, book publishing, radio stations, TV networks and Internet sites."

As for influence peddling, just read this commentary delivered at The Heritage Foundation on how think tank operatives are trained to influence the media. It is a full-time job! Hence, when trying to break through the media, besides lack of funding, such is the competition that bloggers face, from politicians to lobbyists to all sorts of fundamentalists with power, money and connection. My gut feeling? No way!

And so, to cut a long story short, I believe that progressive bloggers are wrong to want to "break into" main-stream media. At the risk of repeating myself, I believe that such a task is all but impossible. There MUST be other ways to spread the progressive message. I think the infrastructure exists: resistance radios, local papers as was mentioned upthread, flyers, blogs, etc. What is lacking is a unifying message. That is a whole new proposition! How does one get from the current progressive cacophony (dealing with important topics, for sure but ...) to a state where people are touched, inspired and want more of what progressives have to say and to offer?

Is that influence? Perhaps she's marginalized herself, but there's no question that conservative voices, no matter how wacked, get access to the cameras and newspapers and skew the debate way right of the mainstream public. They provide simple, simplistic sound bites, playing right into the medium. (And the medium is the message, right?)

What's the message of the internet medium?

Here's something I've noted in my own stats: Links from the biggest sites above, with the exception of Atrios, seem to generate precious little traffic. Sites like Daily Kos are so insular, even a FP mention will generate only a few curiosity hits, while a casual oh-by-the-way link in a modestly trafficked site could generate hundreds of hits. (Now, before the army of consent descends upon me claiming I'm simply attacking Daily Kos, let me say categorically that I'm not. Sure, I have my issues with the site and some personalities there, but this is about the greater "progressive blogosphere" as a whole, which is orders of magnitude larger. Having the biggest blog on the internet is great for the vaguely Democratic/progressive/liberal causes, but it's not enough. The internet rewards internetworking, not just isolated size.)

This is not a new criticism: The big sites tend not to link to the smaller sites. The "Top 100" pay attention to each other, but the real strength of the progressive blogosphere is in the thousands upon thousands of very sharp smaller blogs out there. (Where would many sites be without Peter Daou constantly linking out to mid-sized sites?)

The internet rewards communities across websites. The internet rewards conversations between websites. The internet rewards relevance, which is measured by in-content links from other sites of relevance. This is the state of SEO today.

And blogrolls are mostly ignored by the search engines now -- certainly deprecated. The relevance comes from in-content linking. And there's precious little of that from the big blogs because everybody's looking one way, and the big bloggers don't see the smaller sites behind them.

With all the heated debates on the left-of-right perspectives of the major issues, it would seem that there's plenty of opportunity to link out -- to post a dissenting opionion, for example. But unfortunately there seems to be a mindset on the part of many big bloggers that dissenting opinions should be ignored rather than engaged, preferring to do their part to help a website drift off "in obscurity." If we cannot embrace the dissent within our vaguely-defined "ranks", then how can we expect more progressive influence? If we're so busy ignoring each other, then how can we expect others to pay attention?

Changing this paradigm may not affect how the MSM treats the blogosphere, but it WILL affect how Google News treats these hits. I have some email alerts for Google News, and in the results I'd say 2/3 are mainstream news sources and 1/3 are conservative sites (like "LifeNews"). Every now and then a liberal voice comes through, but that seems very rare in my experience. Does Google have a news bias?

But here we are, 7+ years since the Cluetrain started, and we who are most advantaged by these trends collectively continue to fail to appreciate it, and act upon it.

Cross-linking helps. And that takes effort, work, time. But with money or not, people already are blogging the heck out of the topics of the day from a progressive perspective. The real question, perhaps, is not whether they should be paid by a thinktank, but rather why so many excellent voices languish in obscurity, ignored not just by Google News and the MSM but by their peers.