Inside LabourStart

Derek Blackadder writes:

Time to start to flog the photos to various magazines and such that we have contacts at. Our Times in Canada. I also know the people at Labour Notes in the US fairly well … I’ll also contact some other Canadian magazines and such. Initially I’m just saying that the contest ends with the month and if they’re interested they can use them, help us announce the results and flog next year’s contest. … If you would do the same in your necks of the woods that would be great.

I agree – Eric.

Derek adds:

Please do flog this with progressive media you may have contacts at/with. It’s free material for them, so they should be interested. If they do get picked-up, please let me know and send along the URL and even a print copy if that’s the only way in which it gets published. I’d like to pass that kinda stuff along to the photographers.

I’ve resumed work on this — a complicated project. A first draft of the regional news pages (in English only for now) can be seen here and here.

Arieh added a comment:

Eric: Thanks for the work on the regional news pages, specifically the Middle East one. Not a major matter, but can Bahrain be included? There may be other relevant countries not included, but that’s all I noticed at first glance.

Eric replied:

Now done.  If anyone spots any other countries missing from regional pages, let me know.

I’ve a couple of important fixes to the pages that show news by country (e.g., Canada) and state/province (e.g., Ontario).

First, we’re now showing the same list of languages on the latter as we do on the index pages and the news-by-country page.

Second, I’ve fixed the signup to our mailing list on the state/province page which was still showing the icontact details.

Third, there is now a mailing list signup for the first time on the national news pages.

This is important, because there is a daily trickle of people now signing up directly to the mailing lists from our news pages, and we know that the national news pages (especially the US one) are hugely popular.

We need to keep paying attention for things that may have slipped through in all the changes we’ve made in recent weeks as we moved over to the new database and mailing list system.

One of our readers has correctly pointed out that our mailings come from my name and are sent by unionlists.org.uk — so it’s not clear to her that they come from LabourStart. I don’t want to use ‘LabourStart’ in the subject line as many organizations do — I prefer to be flexible with that.

Instead, I’ve changed the name of the ‘owner’ of the list on Unionlists from ‘Eric Lee’ to ‘LabourStart’ and this should be reflected in the next mailing we send out (in English). If it works well, we’ll do the same for the other 21 mailing lists.

Espen commented:

sounds reasonable – ok with me