Newsletter

The Green Party faces two problems.  Lack of funding, and the MSM blackout.  The solution to both problems is to publish a branded, fund raising,  curated newsletter, initially on email, and then on  multiple channels. 

At the bottom of this page is the first example of the Green Maps  newsletter.  The data is old, and the links go to my development server, which may be down, but at least you can see what it will look like.  Let me discuss the details.

Why Curated?  Well there is so much great content out there.  Too much of it really.  There is no point eventrying to compete.  One is doomed to failure. Much better just to source lots of content, read it, and recommend the good stuff. 

Why RSS based? RSS is an ancient technology, and a great way to circumvent censorship.  Most news sites publish an RSS news feed with their newest articles.  My software goes out to those news feeds, downloads the newest articles, and provides them to me for curation.  Every WordPress site has an RSS feed, so I can read all of the RSS feeds for all of the Green Party web sites in a state, and automatically generate a news feed.  Of course if I did that for the whole US, that would be a lot of noise.  But maybe on a state level it would work.  The articles are all relevant to the people in that state. 

Why Signal?Everyone knows what an email newsletter is.  But people do not like emails, they prefer texting apps like SMS, What's App, and Telegram, which all have better interfaces on cell phones.  Of course they all track you like gang busters,  and some even censor messages, so if you care to preserve your privacy, the right thing to do is to use the Signal App.  It is both open source and non-profit. 

The combination of Email and Signal is great. Email reaches everyone.  Signal provides a much better user  experience, privacy, plus you get the news the moment it is published.  Email has to wait for a while to accumulate a number of articles.  So email and Signal cover everything.  Discord is also useful.  

Why fund raising?  For two reasons.  People want good news.  We all understand that the main stream media is broken.  We have to pay a little bit, or else we are getting lied to.  Most recently Substack.com received $10 million in venture capital, for paid newsletters,  but they are part of the surveillance capitalism.  And a subscription only gives you one writer of very long articles.  Much much better to get short reviews of lots of didderent sources. 

Why Branded?  Well if the email newsletter comes from you favorite candidate or local party, you can reply to it, and engage with that person.  You build a relationship, which works for both of you.  And nobody has the time to publish a newsletter, so best to just use a branded newsletter. 

What is Next? Well I am not quite sure.  I can now send out mass emails.  You receive them at most daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, based on your selection.   I need to exercise the system, make sure that everything works, and then add in fund raising, probably using Pay Pal.  I need to connect to signal, and discord.  Mostly I need to engage with people, and find out what they need.