Progressive Congress News has a lot of things, like daily policy information on Energy, Environment, Economy, Education, Labor, LGBT issues, Healthcare, Immigration, Transportation, and National Security. These ten areas get distilled down into the Summary, which is meant for Congressional chiefs of staff and Media, which is meant for communications directors.
Our content starts on Twitter and can be seen in our transparent NetVibes newsrooms. Every morning paper.li broadsheets are generated from the previous day's news. You can sign up for a Salsa email blast and see what Congressional staff see. If you've got an iPhone, Blackberry, or Android you can join 200,000 VisibleVote subscribers in seeing our content on your phone.
We have blogging accounts here for each area and Facebook, too, but we don't have enough hands to activate them yet.
What we very pointedly don't have is advertising, and we need your help to keep it that way.
OK, I lied just a little bit – we don't control the paper.li platform and they do insert Google Ads into the dailies generated there. We've asked them what it will cost to have our papers run without any ads and we're also considering other platforms. We're just letting it ride for the moment.
Our marketing professional friends are puzzled and distressed that we won't even hear talk of advertising. We're all about attention conservation – there's a reason we get in excess of a 50% open rate when we send a breaking news blast. The industry standards are 5% to 10%. We provide what Congressional staff need for policy making and we don't even permit the occasional straight news story, let alone some BUY NOW OPERATORS ARE STANDING BY!@!@!@!@! nuisance popping up in the middle of everything.
Nine months ago Darcy Burner handed me a little four page write up on the need for a Progressive echo chamber in the media. Progressive Congress News is the seed crystal for that, it's here working every single day, and in the running for up to $400,000 in grant money from the Knight Foundation's News Challenge. Those funds won't be available until mid summer, assuming we actually do win.
People have volunteered. I see 27 names in the Progressive Congress News Google Group. Things are growing so quickly I don't know all of them any more – @SandiBehrns took over coordinating and training volunteers a while ago.
Many of the Wardogs – a group of bloggers with a proven bite who formed up for the 2010 midterms – have stuck around to help do other stuff. As we expand into new spaces, Facebook for instance, we always find Progressive organizers who are glad to see us coming.
We've received one very interesting service donation – use of a retired computational fluid dynamics supercomputer. This machine is going to be hosted for us by its original owner and we're talking about something that would cost us $3,200 a month from RackSpace if we tried to duplicate it. We're going to have some advanced social media statistics research going on this just as soon as we finish putting it back into service.
We put in a request for ten of the Google Cr-48 ChromeOS laptops that are being given out in a pilot program. These came too late for Beth and I. My tired old 2005 Dell laptop periodically locks up and one of these days it's just not going to start. Her Macbook, bought used a year ago, is showing signs that the video is simply going to stop one day soon. We're on AT&T (I know, I know, it's the only service that works here) and they were running a special – Acer Aspire One netbooks for $9.99 after rebate, so we brought home two of them last week.
We've gone as far as we can with volunteers, laptops built out of the remains of three similar machines, free internet services like paper.li or NetVibes, and the kindness of Kossacks who let us stay with them as we go about our mission.
Nine days from now we climb into the car and head for the Pennsylvania Progressive Summit. Beth is the program co-chair for this 600 attendee event, a role she also filled in 2010 for the very first annual gathering. She is appearing on two panels and I have one.
The Keystone Progress Education Fund won $50,000 from the Pepsi Refresh Challenge last summer and they're using the money to host a communications training for 501c3 employees the Friday before the Summit. Beth and I are providing the social media training track for this one day event in conjunction with Alan Rosenblatt from the Center for America Progress and blogger & author Cliff Schecter.
As soon as the Summit is over we're giving Darcy Burner a lift to the airport, then we turn towards D.C. ourselves for a seven day stay.
The D.C. twitterati are gathering to listen to the State of the Union and we'll be there. Beth and Congressman Grijalva are going to be doing a liveblog here on DailyKos. There will be a mixer for Congressional staff at the Progressive Congress headquarters so we can meet the people who are using and promoting Progressive Congress News. There will be a Shoe Crew safari that Friday night.
That stuff is all great fun, but we're not going to D.C. for a week of vacation. We've been hired directly by Congressman Grijalva's office to help them build their social media presence. We've been invited to address a gathering of the combined House and Senate office communication directors on how to interact with the blogosphere and what VisibleVote means for citizen engagement. That's just the roughly one quarter of what's happening that I can actually talk about – there is a lot of interest in government transparency and reaching out to grassroots after the thrashing Democrats just took in the 2010 midterm.
Now if I could just be sure we're going to be able to afford to go.
I had just under $500 in my pocket and we were set … until a doctor's visit last Thursday got over $300 of it. Most of you know what I've been through health wise. I'm still uninsured and I just can't take any chances – when trouble arises I have to be seen. This time it was good news – the symptoms that drove me to make the appointment turned out to be signs that I'm actually healing from the damage Lyme disease caused. Where there were five prescriptions now there are just two and I'm almost back to something that could be described as 'normal'.
Yes, we've been hired by Grijalva's office. The staff are amazing, but the overall payables process? It’s not set up for a hand to mouth startup like us. The first payment will apparently arrive here in Illinois about the time we’re ready to leave D.C. to come back home.
And now you understand our dilemma. We've walked through fire these last seventeen months since we put this new mode of organizing into motion at Netroots Nation 2009. Here we are, ten days short of what should be a thumping victory for both us personally and the whole Progressive blogosphere. We can't finish this run alone.
We have a little over fourteen hundred miles to drive. We need a hotel room for the two nights we're in Pittsburgh at the Summit. We have to eat. A weekly pass for the D.C. Metro is $50 for each of us.
$500 is all that stands between us and a year and a half of effort from four dozen people finally paying off.
You can make this happen ... for all of us. Progressive Congress will reimburse us for our cell bill ($400!), our internet at the house, and a few other expenses, then we'll be able to finish this job. You will have to specify 'Progressive Congress News' when you donate.