Inside LabourStart

Our email lists continue to grow. Today, it turned out that 20% of those voting for the Labour Photo of the Year competition were not yet subscribers to our list, and had agreed to be added. That’s 429 more people on the mailing list — another great reason to have done this competition.

It was pointed out to us that the clever solution we’ve come up for in the language home pages – which shows the most recently submitted stories on top – wasn’t yet working on the country home pages. So in countries with lots of stories each day, such as Canada, the most recently submitted stories were appearing at the bottom of the list. This has now been fixed.

Twenty four hours after we posted the current campaign, only 3 people (myself included) have sent off messages.  This is in spite of the fact that it appears on top of our list on the English langauge home page, that it has been syndicated and a priority one story has been linked to it.  As I have long argued, merely publishing a campaign to a website has little effect.  We must do more.

So even though it’s a weekend and we don’t expect much of a response, I’ve started a publicity blitz that I hope will generate large numbers of new signatories to this campaign.  Here is what I’ve done (and I’ll keep updating this list as it goes along):

• I’ve sent off the campaign link for translation into Norwegian, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish and Russian.  Other languages may follow.
• I created a Cause on Facebook and invited 60 of my friends to join the cause – this is the maximum number I am allowed to invite today.  The Cause includes a link to the campaign page.  I’ve made this Cause my Featured Cause on my own Facebook profile.
• I’ve changed our software so that if it detects that there is Facebook cause linked to the campaign, it automatically shows this on the campaign page.
• Sent a message via Facebook to the 1,746 members of the LabourStart group.
• Sent a Tweet to our 575 followers on Twitter — our first in nearly two months.

UPDATE: This campaign has just gone live – in English.

We’ll be launching a new campaign today at the request of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in Washington, D.C.

We received this email two days ago from South Africa:

This serves to confirm that dully mandated representatives of the Union and the Company signed an agreement which effectively marks an end to a protracted strike over an organisational rights dispute between the SACCAWU and Woolworths. Union members will be returning to work from Friday the 24th of October whilst a Joint membership verification exercise will commence on Monday the 27th of October under the auspices of the CCMA. The Union accordingly calls off the consumer boycott since the dispute that compelled the Union to call for a consumer boycott has now been resolved.

We’ll be reporting this to our readers in this week’s mailing.

See here

1,932 votes cast so far. See here.

Derek commented:

Thanks for the tip on this Andrew, Eric.Can I ask everyone to flog the contest page (NOT the counter page) to their lists ASAP? We have less than 2 weeks left in the voting period.

Here’s the text of my latest column for Labour Research:

For more than a decade, LabourStart has provided online news for trade unionists. This summer the website underwent a major overhaul most of which was not visible to the casual visitor. But the changes have allowed British trade unionists to see things they could never see before.

A visit to http://www.labourstart.org/uk/ reveals a number of changes which we think you’ll find useful.

First of all, many of the news stories previously labelled as being from the “UK” are now also labelled if they are from England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.

If you click on any of those terms (which are highlighted in green), you’re taken to a news page featuring news only from that region.

Second, on the main UK news page, where previously you were shown the most recent 100 news stories and had to use the search box to find any others, you can now click on a “more” button on the bottom of each page and scroll through.

This is useful because LabourStart features on average 100 UK trade union news stories every week.

Those news stories are collected from all over the web — from trade union websites, the BBC, and newspaper sites, including many local newspapers. Those doing the collecting are LabourStart’s volunteer correspondents. Over 140 of them have posted 31,000 UK union news stories in the last several years to our database. All 31,000 of those stories remain accessible — making this an invaluable tool for researchers.

Some people may not realise this, but you don’t need to visit the LabourStart website to see the latest UK labour news stories we’re linking to. Our syndication tool allows any union website to freely use the stories — it’s a simple copy and paste to do this. One hundred and twenty UK trade union websites use LabourStart’s newswire today.

You and your union can be more involved. You can signup to become a volunteer correspondent and make sure we cover your union’s news. And you can learn more about how to put a live union news feed on your website. Visit our front page at http://www.labourstart.org

Activate is the magazine (print and web) for activists in the public sector union PCS (300,000 members). Here is their website.   I’ve been asked to prepare a 500 word article for their December issue about 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.