Catching Up Today; Meta on Future Majority

I took yesterday off to recuperate from two weeks straight on the road attending both the DNC and RNC. Today I'm catching up on all my email, bloglines, etc. As part of that, I've got about 150 Google Alerts from the past two weeks and I intend to do a quick media scan to get a sense of what the coverage was like for the progressive youth community. I'll try to post that this week, though it may take awhile to complete. It's probably at least three or four hundred articles to read, and I'll probably double check Lexis/Nexis to make sure I didn't miss anything big.

I'm also working on a big story about my time at the RNC, but I'm going to be pitching it to some magazines, so you may not see anything about it on these pages for a week or more depending on how that goes.

In the meantime, I hope you all won't mind indulging me for a minute in a little meta commentary about this blog, blogging in general, and what it is, exactly, that we do around here.

In the last couple of weeks, I've had a number of people express everything from irritation to anger about the things that get written on this blog. I won't call out names because that would be counterproductive.

In part, I think there is much confusion as to what I do and what this blog is. Am I a journalist? Sometimes. Am I an activist? Sometimes. Being a blogger is a cross between the two. I try to be less partisan and more evenhanded than an activist might be when I can, but I also do not have the time or resources to be as stringent in my standards as a journalist. I'm not responsible for producing 2 - 3 stories a week that are fact checked and read by editors. I'm responsible for coming up with something fresh every single day - often more than once per day - that sheds light on the work happening in progressive youth organizing, attracts readers, and hopefully makes us all a little better at what we do. As such, our work here is more editorial in nature than standard reporting.

If that was all I did, I would have a lot more time to interview and write, and I'd have a lot more empathy for those expressing their displeasure. But blogging is only a tiny fraction of what I do each day. I'm also managing a ridiculous amount of incoming information - from dozens of Google Alerts, hundreds of Blog Feeds, the major national news papers, hundreds of emails, and phone calls; I'm talking to press; I'm participating on conference calls with other organizations; I'm talking to donors; I'm trying to plan ahead so I can keep doing this next year; I'm traveling way more than I would like; I'm trying to recruit new writers to alleviate the publishing pressure and get better quality content on the site; and I'm trying to read political books to stay current.

To be clear, I'm not whining. I get paid to blog. There are so few people who can say that, and I regard it as a privilege that I'm able to do so. I'm hugely thankful to my supporters for that opportunity and I don't regret a single minute I spend on any of these activities. But this is to say that I'm super busy and everyone should have realistic standards about what it is we are doing here.

The purpose of this site is to cut out the bottlenecks in progressive youth organizing, open up channels of information and communication, and make the entire sector of the progressive movement more transparent, efficient, and navigable for the major players and for the new people joining our ranks every day. I know a lot of people would prefer that much of what goes on here happen behind closed doors in private chats and emails, but I don't personally find that useful. That mentality ensures that a few select people get better at what they do, while the younger generation of leaders is forced to learn it all over again via trial and error. It's a really bad way to ensure the passing of institutional knowledge. Judging by the compliments we get for our work here (yes it happens), I think a lot of people feel the same way.

What we do here is far from perfect. We'll get stuff wrong occasionally, and sometimes people will come away with hard feelings from tough criticism. But I think it makes us all better and if a few people are embarrassed now and then, it is still a far superior situation to the "three men in a room" strategy where these types of critiques stay behind closed doors among the leadership.

In the future, I'll do my best to be more fair to all of you out there and your work, but please realize the limitations under which we operate and realize that you don't have to be passive consumers here. Youth organizers and organizations have the ability to shape the message on this site and there are a number of avenues through which you can do so:

• Pick up the phone/email and talk it out with me. I'm perfectly happy to write followups and admit when I'm wrong. A fact that should be very obvious after last weeks' correction.
• Leave a comment in the relevant blog post. This is such an easy thing, yet so few people do it. Anecdotally, the Young Democrats did this frequently when I was criticizing some of their work. Eventually we developed a rapport and an understanding about what they were doing, why, and how effective it was. Today this site is a big booster for their organization because they took the time to engage in a conversation on this site.
• You could sign up for an account and write your own blog. If you are responding directly to something I said about you or your organization, there is a 99% chance that I will put your post on the front page and provide your response with equal coverage to the audience this blog reaches.
• Pre-empt me by writing about your own organization on this blog before I do. I have an open invitation out to any staffer at a progressive youth organization to have a standing column about the work they are doing on this site. People get upset with what I write here because they know that their peers, donors and journalists read this site. As such, good or bad criticism can have a direct effect on the organization's reputation among an influential group of people. Yet even so, very few groups take advantage of the opportunity to represent themselves in this space.

I'd also ask that you consider the limitations under which we work here and what it takes for you to be helpful to us in the writing of a blog post:

• If I or another Future Majority blogger contact you about a something - it means we are writing a post at that moment and need an answer within 1 - 2 hours at most. That may seem unreasonable, but it's the time frame within which we work every single day.
• If you do get in contact with us, make sure it is a real conversation. There are a number of organizations that frequently give me nothing but standard PR speak. That's not helpful to me and that may in fact be why I (personally) may not always ask your organization for a comment.

If you feel like I should be in closer contact with you, I'm sorry. I promise to try harder on my end. But please consider that this is an open forum and you could also step-it-up on your end if you are unhappy with the coverage you or your organization receive on this blog.