THIS MODERN WORLD

TMW vanished from a paper for a week or two recently (due to space issues), and a reader wrote me to ask about it. I forwarded the email to the editor, who replied:

I am glad to know that our readers miss their features enough to write in. That really does drive our decisions on what is OK — or not — to pull from print when we’re forced to do so.

Whether or not they acknowledge it so honestly, your emails to editors do make a difference. If you’ve stopped reading a paper because they dropped TMW, you should send them a note and let them know. If you pick up your local altweekly primarily to read TMW, you should let them know that as well. And if there’s a paper in your area that seems like a good fit for TMW, write them and tell them you’d very much appreciate seeing it there.

And, pre-emptively: yes, I understand print media are dying, blah blah blah. But as long as there are still newspapers, I want to be running in them. I don’t make enough income from online sources alone to pay the bills. And as my friend Derf says, I don’t want to be the appetizer course at the Donner Party. I’m just trying to hang in as long as I can — which is, when you think about it, pretty much what all of us are doing in this life.

Your support is, as always, appreciated more than I can say.

… tangentially related: Bors on the future of news.

From Mike Allen on Twitter:

Today (7/8/09) at 34 min and 56 sec past noon (12:34:56), the time and date together will be 123456789.

Palin resigns. This is something of a rarity for me as a weekly cartoonist: a genuinely timely cartoon!

David Swanson:

There are a million and one things that people can do to try to end the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and to prevent new ones in Iran and elsewhere, as well as to close U.S. military bases in dozens of other nations around the world. Certain people are skilled at or interested in particular approaches, and nobody should be discouraged from contributing to the effort in their preferred ways. Far too often proposals to work for peace are needlessly framed as attacks on all strategies except one. But where new energy can be created or existing resources redirected, it is important that they go where most likely to succeed.

In my analysis, we should be focusing on three things, which for purposes of brevity and alliteration I will call: Communications, Congress, and Counter recruitment / resistance. Communications encompasses all public discussion of the wars and impacts all other approaches, including targets I consider far less likely to be influenced by us than Congress, such as the president, generals, the heads of weapons companies, the heads of media companies, the people of Afghanistan, your racist neighbor, etc. If our communications strategy can change the behavior of any of these targets, terrific! We should be prepared to take advantage of such opportunities should they arise. But the first place we are likely to be able to leverage successful communications will be the House of Representatives. Counter-recruitment / resistance is another area that overlaps with communications but involves much else as well, and it is a strategy that we continue to underestimate.

The rest.

Who would have guessed the corporate media would completely ignore the simplest solution to the health-care crisis? Just because it would massively reduce the profits of big corporations?

Yet shockingly enough, that’s just what’s been happening. Help Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting to tell them to stop: