Hello young Kossacks (Kossacks Under 35 . . . ?)
I'd like to invite you to join a new progressive blog community dedicated to young voters, young candidates, and youth issues: Future Majority.
It can be frustrating being a young person on Daily Kos, especially if you are writing about youth issues - the youth vote, policy, young candidates and youth infrastructure. Oftentimes our posts get quickly pushed down the diaries with only a few comments. Even more frequently, pro-youth diaries are met with hostile comments about the unreliable youth vote.
This is not to say it's all bad. Georgia10 is a strong voice for the next generation on this site, and Kossacks Under 35 have worked for over a year now to create a youth community within Daily Kos. The Rescue Rangers are an indispensable ally for youth organizers on the site. Indeed, it was the Rescue Rangers and their efforts that helped me initially build the profile of Future Majority as a youth blog, and it is because my diaries were regularly rescued that I met my publishers and wrote my book. To all of them, and to this community, I'm forever grateful.
But wouldn't it be nice to have a partisan youth community where we could strategize, share best practices, discuss candidates (and have candidates live blog), talk about the issues and, in general, create a piece of netroots infrastructure dedicated to strengthening the voice of young people in Democratic politics?
I believe Future Majority is fast becoming that place and I'd like to invite you to join me, and others, in building that community.
Future Majority recently underwent an extensive redesign. As part of that, we rolled out additional functionality that allows anyone who is a registered user on the site to post their own blogs. These blogs automatically appear in a sidebar near the top of the page called "Recent Blog Posts." In short - the potential is now there for Future Majority to function in much the same manner as the Daily Kos, Open Left, or any other progressive community blog.
I want to invite all of you to become users on Future Majority and to post blogs about what your organization is doing, best practices (worst practices), thoughts on the election, and just about anything you want as long as it is related in some way to youth, politics, technology, or any combination thereof.
This is not an entirely selfish ask. Y'all are smart folks and I imagine that what you write will frequently be featured on the front page. I'll also be keeping my eye out for potential front-page writers.
What you get out of it:
- Getting your message in front of donors, A-list bloggers, media, and in general a highly influential audience. FM has an influential, if still small, readership, and it is much easier to get your ideas heard by people in power.
- A higher signal to noise ratio than on other progressive community blogs.
- More direct access to candidates. In the last month alone we had Darcy Burner, Scott Kleeb, Jared Polis, George Colli, Donald Betts, and the father/son duo of Patrick and Mike Slattery live blog on the site. This is your opportunity to talk to these candidates without having to fight through 400 other commenters. Andrew Rice is scheduled to live blog on the 31st and in partnership with the Young Voter PAC, I'm sure we'll do many more such events.
- The potential to be a front-pager on a nationally recognized blog. (Future Majority was recently credentialed to cover the Democratic Convention, and we're going to be hosting a number of events at Netroots Nation this week.
How it Helps the Movement:
- Creates a one-stop-shop for information on what is happening in progressive youth organizing (even more so than now)
- Further spreads ideas, strategies and best practices so we all can rise together and become better at what we do (and so the next generation has a much quicker learning curve).
- Builds more traffic for Future Majority which in turn increases what we can do as an organization (bringing in candidates to live-blog on the site, send more traffic and volunteers to progressive youth organizations, running rapid response campaigns like those we did against Tom Friedman and the Clinton's in Iowa, and perhaps eventually raising money for candidates and orgs).
This is not an either/or proposition. I'm not asking you to abandon Daily Kos. I love the Great Orange Satan as much as y'all. But I think we have the chance to build something important here and I hope you'll join me.