The Progressive Pamphleteer

Back in November of last year, I speculated on ways to get the Progressive message out beyond the echo chamber of political bloggers. The imperative to attempt something like this is again apparent after the farcical "interview and open house" Harper had with Duffy last week. This was reinforced by reading Andrew Cohen's review of The Dion Tape (see my previous post).

I dislike the idea of carping about a problem and not trying to correct it. So I have set up a Google Group called The Progressive Pamphleteer. Bloggers are sometimes thought of as the Pamphleteers of today. But there is a missing link in the blogging process. Thomas Paine and other pamphleteers would physically distribute their ideas and criticism by handing out pamphlets. Bloggers only get read by people who know about their blog. Aggregators such as Progressive Bloggers, New Democrats Online and Liberals Online help but they are mostly talking to the same pool of politically motivated people. The vast majority of Canadians are unaware of these aggregators. Case in point, I found out about Progressive Bloggers through the relentless commenting by Scott Tribe on DailyKos. Each one ended with an encouragement to check out Progressive Bloggers. If not for those trailers, I doubt if I would have heard about the site. We need a way to send out the cream of our work to the majority of Canadians who are poorly served by the current media.

This is where The Progressive Pamphleteer comes in. It will allow for an email summary of the week's best progressive posts to be distributed to members of the group. These emails can then be forwarded to friends and family who are interested in the big picture of what is going on. Automatic posting to your blog can be facilitated by contributing the mail to blogger email address. I am trying to find out if this sort of automatically available with Twitter. If not people could add the address a weekly Tweet. Anything to help the truth go viral.

Initially, I will post my favourites from the previous week. You may contribute suggestions by emailing the title and link to constant.vigil@gmail.com. I will not contribute any of my posts unless they have been strongly recommended by several others. I can see there being categories for the Post of the Week such as The Economy, The Environment, Equality Issues, Politics, International Affairs. Eventually, I would prefer if others who specialize in these topics take over the selection process.

I have no idea if this will work but it is worth a try. You may sign up for the group by using the box shown below. I have added this promotion box to the sidebar of my blog.

Subscribe to The Progressive Pamphleteer

Email:

Visit this group

Recommend this Post