Reply #41: Oh please, oh please, oh please ... [View All]

This thread is SO full of good ideas.

I particularly like the idea of having a daily-couple-of-sheets of double sided material that I could print off a couple of copies every day to "leave for the next person to read" on my daily commute to downtown on the train. For example I see people leaving religious tracts in each seat (often moderately substantial pamphlets) -- literally working the whole train, as it were, with their literature. Even though I, personally, am not interested in reading those I always love it when someone before me has left the daily newspaper and I can browse it on the ride. Fold it neatly and leave it for the next person. You know, an act of thoughtfulness, not one of littering.

A printed monthly for subscribers would, of course, be great, but a method to distribute news and analysis that the MSM is ignoring, all on a regular basis, in brief and concise form, and as it is happening in real time so that people can get counteranalysis to what there're currently hearing in the MSM (not a month later after the've moved on to other events) -- the kind of news and analysis that we're all geting here at DU -- well, I can't recommend this idea enough!

Keep it short (a couple, maybe three double-sided pages, standard letter size), post it to DU as a PDF so it will be simple for anyone to print up, update it regularly (once daily or even twice a week or weekly if that's all that can be handled in the beginning -- just on a regular and expected basis so people will know to download and distribute, for example, on Monday and Thursday).

Then stand back and let the good members of DU do the rest. Look, if only 10% of the DU membership (estimated at, what, 50,000 (?) if you leave a margin for those registrants who, for whatever reason, got bored, distracted, or whatever, and no longer log onto DU), that's an INSTANTANEOUS CIRCULATION of say 5,000 copies, on say a bi-weekly basis. Wow.

And what about all those people who only visit to read the news and opinion at DU, but never register. There's got to be at least an equal number of those; if 10% of those would commit to distributing one copy to a friend or neighbor, of a twce-weekly newsletter, and there are another 50,000 unregistered-but-regular readers (I was one for years), well that would mean another 5,000 issues of circulation (10,000 issues total) of said bi-weekly news-and-analysis within the first month.

I'd distribute it to my friends and fellow neighborhood democrats - not to mention leave a copy on the train everytime I could -- I'm betting that thousands of DUers would do the same.