> Around 1910 there was a weekly magazine in this country called Appeal to
> Reason. Can anyone guess its paid circulation? 700,000, with a
> readership of four million. Think about that, and about the US
> population in 1910. What were the conditions then, and what are the
> conditions now? In particular, why are our print media so enfeebled and
> impoverished? The Nation is the premier Left magazine, and its
> circulation is 100,000; The Progressive has 30,000, Z magazine has
> 20,000. If you add up the circulation of our entire print media today,
> we don't even approach a quarter of what Appeal To Reason had 90 years
> ago. And you don't have to go back 90 years. Just go back to George
> Seldes, the legendary radical journalist. He had a wonderful newsletter
> call In Fact. When he stopped publishing in 1947, it had 150,000 paid
> subscribers.
>
> We need to recreate that, perhaps not in the same forms, but in the
> forms that have been alluded to by others. I'm firmly committed to
> electronic media. I don't want to dis my print brothers and sisters, but
> tapes, CD's, and videos are where it's at right now. And that's where
> it's going to grow exponentially.
Whenever I go to the bookstore these days and I see all of the right wing books on the shelves, I always wonder why progressives and radicals can't do better. We were doing better last year, with several lefty titles selling well and getting on the bestseller lists. But I've been asking myself lately why we aren't doing better on the bookshelves. One new theory that I'm mulling over is that too many talented left writers are ensconced in academia and are wasting their time turning out unreadable postmodernist crap. I think this theory has some merit, as I've been reading a recent copy of Left Curve.
Some of the stuff in there in pretty good, but I've found one essay with so much bad postmodernist jargon that the article should be framed on the wall as an example of bad writing.
While the situation with print media isn't encouraging, we've been kicking butt online, with many left and activist websites enjoying lots of visits.
Chuck0
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"The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free..." ---Utah Phillips