Mass mailings with a difference, new correspondents, revived language editions and more
The main news story for us last week was the sudden passing of our friend and comrade Andrew Casey. (See the the stories below for our obituary, shared with LabourStart’s English language mailing list, and a video of Andrew’s first – and last – speech.)
We’ve begun a series of mass mailings, probably one per month, which will not focus just on a campaign, but on news and analysis. (This is one more way in which LabourStart is not a clicktivist organisation.) The first such message is a 500-word piece by Derek Blackadder about the split in the Canadian labour movement. It got a lot of feedback, and was a good thing. We’re open to your ideas about what subjects we should cover and who should write these short, 500-word pieces (with links of course).
This week we added four new correspondents, one from Australia, one from India and two from Georgia. That’s a total of six new correspondents in three weeks. I’ve decided to resume doing regular (probably monthly) mailings to all correspondents. If any of you have any thoughts about this — things we could be saying — please let me know.
We continue to revive our dormant language editions, and following the success with Finnish and Swedish, last week we recruited a new translator for Polish. Next week, we’ll focus on Japanese.
Finally, our mailing lists continue to grow, despite not having new campaigns. We picked up 105 new subscribers this week.
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A couple of things for correspondents.
1. We have a number of pages with nothing in the Top Stories section or some items but they are very old. We need to encourage some churn on those pages. I think we need more stress on bumping stories up.
2. Andrew’s sudden death exposed a problem we have been talking about for a while: we do not have a central file with the login info for the many Twitter and Facebook accounts out there with the LabourStart name on them. The Australian Twitter account, which was quite popular and had not just a lot of followers but which received more RTs and LIKEs than any of our other accounts, is now lost to us. Something similar happened a few years ago in the US.
I’ve read Derek’s piece, but where can I read the feedback?
If you mean Derek’s article on Canada, the feedback came in the form of email messages to him.