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Dear C4SS Supporters,

It's been a great month at the Center!

In February, I made 37,311 submissions of op-eds by our authors to 2,588 media outlets worldwide. That's a little off my current goal of 40,000 submissions, but not for lack of content. It's just that most of our op-eds were "US-centric" rather than of global interest. I'll be encouraging our authors to cast a wider net across those imaginary lines that politicians draw on the ground to look for commentary topics.

My usual goal (for the last year or so) for pickups and mentions is 50. Last month we hit 60. This month, 70!

Of those, 68 were pickups of our material by "mainstream" or popular political media. The other two were mentions on Bloomberg -- per Alexa, the 345th most popular web site in the world and ranked 135th most popular in the US -- by David Weigel, who covered the 2015 International Students for Liberty Conference: "Edward Snowden and Ron Paul Kick Off Libertarian Student Conference With a Little Kerfuffle About Russia," and "Bow Ties and Slam Poetry: This Is Libertarianism in 2015."

Of course there's been some controversy about the presence and actions of people associated (and in some cases not associated) with C4SS at that conference. If you haven't read all about it yet and want to, Google is your friend.

I tend to focus my activities at C4SS on audiences outside the movement, so I'm not going to opine here on the details of the intra-movement arguments about this. But what strikes me about the whole thing is the old saying attributed to Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

We just got name-checked in major media as libertarian thought leaders, at least among the student activist crowd, and the follow-up ruckus hasn't been humorous. So to the extent that left market anarchism is competing with other schools of thought for mindshare both within the libertarian movement and outside it, it looks like we're at the "fight" stage.  And to the extent that that second article reflects the views and interests of younger libertarians,  it looks like we're winning the fight for the minds of the movement's next generation (who will be the ones taking libertarian ideas out into the world at large for the next 50 years or so).

So, like I said, great month. With your support, we are shifting the debate both inside and outside the movement. And with your support, we'll continue to do so.

Hey, everyone ... it's almost mid-January, and those of you who follow the Center's media action may be wondering why you haven't heard anything about December yet. There's a reason for that, which I'll explain below, but first the numbers you've been waiting for:

In December 2014, I submitted 33,772 pieces of the Center's English language op-ed content to 2,593 publications worldwide. So far I've identified and logged 47 media "pickups" of C4SS English language content in December.

Submissions slightly lagged my goals for December -- we had a few days with nothing to publish, which meant nothing to submit. I'm actually pretty happy with the pickup numbers for the month. December's always been a difficult month for us, especially in even-numbered years. Between post-election commentary of the type we don't do ("inside baseball" state policy stuff, etc.) and the tendency to go with puff piece editorialism around the Christmas holiday, our pickups tend to drop off a little. They did so this year, but not as much as I had anticipated.

Now, as to why this update is running late:

Whenever there's a significant question raised on the matter of whether to add or remove a source from our "mainstream/popular media pickups" counting, it requires discussion.

Some time back, there was internal discussion at the Center on whether or not to start counting pickups by Before It's News. The result of that discussion was the decision to count those pickups. BIN may not be "mainstream," but it is "popular" (according to the imperfect Alexa rating service, usually among the 2,500 most popular web sites in the world).

Starting late last month, there was again internal discussion concerning BIN and a proposal that we stop counting pickups there. That proposal was driven by two arguments: That BIN is so non-"mainstream" (lots of "conspiracy theory" stuff, etc.) as to not qualify for our pickup tracking criteria, and that it is now (if it ever wasn't) a non-discriminating aggregator rather than a discriminating site with an editorial policy.

I hope I've presented both sides of the logic for counting, or not counting, BIN pickups fairly. If not, I'm sure supporters and opponents of counting BIN pickups will clarify their viewpoints in comments.

In any case, I didn't want to put out a media coordinator report until this issue was resolved, for the simple reason that if we're going to take a double-digit dive in monthly pickup numbers by dropping BIN, I wanted to explain why in this report.

As it happens, our policy remains unchanged -- for the moment. We are, however, looking into the possibility of a more diverse pickup-tracking operation in which "mainstream media," "alt media," "blogs," "aggregators," etc. get separate tracking/reporting functions and we can provide our supporters with more information on our media penetration in general. I'll keep you informed of our progress on that.

I'll be back next month with another report ... hopefully much earlier :)