The Democratic primary process started with a thud, exactly along the lines that Steven Rosenfeld, chief correspondent of our Voting Booth project, had been reporting on and warning about for the past year: untested technology and poor training in Iowa fostered greater distrust in our voting systems.
It could have been even worse—Rosenfeld’s reporting earlier last year helped prevent the Democratic Party from adopting a disastrous online and telephone system for the caucus filled with security holes.
Rosenfeld’s reporting is read and trusted by the voting community—and helps them make better decisions in the future. There are certainly many more key decisions to come before November.
Voting Booth has been reporting from Nevada to cover the rollout of yet another poorly tested app that will be deployed to more untrained caucus volunteers and party officials. The more we cover these stories in detail, the less likely we’ll see the same problems in the rest of the caucuses and primaries this year.
Are you up to speed?
Of course the election is pressing and an area of focus for us. And we also have many other projects going on that cover the troubling issues of our times.
Are you familiar with how we operate and what we’re doing? Corporate media simply is failing at its job, digital media has splintered audiences and shrunk attention spans—and there is still important media work to be done.
I’m asking you to consider how important it is to support media in times like these, read about our model below, and please join us. Can you help us with a generous annual gift, or if you prefer, to be a regular contributor? We can’t do it alone.
Our model is to get the maximum audience and impact on the big issues of our times. In a nutshell, we:
- Syndicate our stories to publishing partners to get our writers’ work published simultaneously in a collective audience that reaches millions, in the U.S. and, increasingly, internationally. Many of the issues we work on are global, and there is a big appetite across the world for good reporting on the environment, and the struggles for independence and democracy.
- We “publish” our articles in full via our big email lists and partners, reaching hundreds of thousands—did you know that many people prefer reading quality journalism via email instead of through the internet? Seventy percent of the people who open our stories read them to the end.
- We get our journalists in touch with media outlets to get them booked on radio and TV to talk about the work we produced with them.
Yes, there’s lots to worry about, but it’s more productive to DO SOMETHING about it!
Check out some of the other big stories we’ve been working on recently:
Earth | Food | Life editor Reynard Loki and the journalists he works with go after the big targets: climate change and habitat loss, fossil fuel companies and other big polluters. And they also know that the job of environmentalism is to tell stories that shift our consciousness about the way we live. Read Leslie Crawford’s essay that challenges us to consider how different we are from an octopus.
We worked for weeks to produce a major and totally unreported story with Our Schools’ Jeff Bryant on Amazon and other large corporations’ efforts to insert themselves into the public schools, focusing on Virginia. It’s yet another front in the war to defend public education, a pillar of our democracy.
Economy for All’s chief contributor is Nancy Altman, who for decades has been a national leader in defending Social Security from the many attempts in Washington to slash it. Read her response to Donald Trump’s claims in the State of the Union that he has nothing but good intentions toward Social Security.
Thanks from Jan Ritch-Frel and the rest of the IMI team!