Antiwar.com Monthly Update

We at Antiwar.com are initiating a regular (probably monthly) letter to you, our supporters. We hope to share with you some of the inner workings and successes and struggles of Antiwar.com as both a website and as a growing organization.

First, however, we'd simply like to say "thanks." Antiwar.com is only made possible by people such as yourself who put money and talents behind your convictions. And there are more of you than ever before! In our current fund-raising effort, what's notable is that the number of donors has grown significantly. We are evolving from an organization supported largely by a few key contributors to one that has a much broader base. This, we believe, is key to stimulating a coherent, informed, and activist national-even international-movement that is effective in the antiwar arena.

So, what have we been up to behind the scenes? Let's look at our how the website is doing as a part of the media, what's up with its content and format; how we're doing financially; what's happening in our non-web projects; future ideas and plans; and a quick overview of hot topics from the past month.

WEBSITE: QUANTIFYING THE VIRTUAL

In September we had our second-best month ever (after October 2001), with just over 300,000 unique visitors. We also topped our record on Yahoo Full Coverage, with 584 stories on their current events news pages. And our articles have been increasingly picked up by more news sources, including Yahoo Full Coverage, Working for Change, Media Monitors, Palestine Chronicle, and World Net Daily.

Another way of assessing effectiveness is to look at site rankings. Alexa.com provides such a service, attempting to assess the popularity of all websites (with 10's of millions of sites, a gargantuan task). It does this reasonably well with some caveats (bias for Windows machines; odd unexplained bias for Korean sites; false positive feedback loop created if site links to Alexa itself; so on). Not unexpectedly, the top 500 sites include big retail (e.g., Disney), big services (e.g., Wells Fargo), porn, porn, porn...and for political/intellectual content you have the big media: BBC/USA Today/NY Times/IndiaTimes, etc. Drudge seems to be the outlier news source.

So, to examine sites somewhat more comparable to Antiwar.com, we looked at WorkingForChange (ranked at 23,014), Alternet.org (13,638), and CommonDreams.com (7721). These sites are somewhat portal-like in that they are big, with a lot of content, update frequently, link to many other sites, and offer a mix of news and opinion. They are also anti-interventionist, albeit from a progressive stance, and also carry content other than foreign policy. (The smaller Anti-Intervention Network ranks in at 635,554.) This said, Antiwar.com comes in at a respectable 6246 as of 10/2, up from 6959 on 9/12. Of course, we want this number to rise, and we are pushing for this, by, for one thing...

ISSUING A PRESS RELEASE ABOUT ANTIWAR.COM

We are crafting our first-ever release to go out to pretty much all print newspapers this coming week. A spate of recent print coverage of on-line anti-intervention sites spurred us to do this. The release, graciously being written by Alan Bock, will introduce Antiwar.com and its accomplishments to date. We expect some straight coverage, but also hope to get some features. So you might keep an eye out and let us know what you see. On the web itself we do well-the Alexa statistics indicate, for example, that we are linked to 892 other sites. Internet outlets including Yahoo.com also now use Antiwar.com as a primary source for antiwar information.

FORM FOLLOWS CONTENT

We continue to hone our content, having this summer filled one gaping lacunae with Praful Bidwai's great perspective on India-Pakistan. We are now looking to find the same kind of authoritative voice for Chechnya and in fact may have something soon. Beyond this, we have started a longer-term effort to provide historical/political background to the major world conflicts. And our summer intern, Mike Ewens, neatly kicked this off with his "Iraq Update" page, as one of his many projects.

Our goals for the format of the website center around increasing interactivity (e.g., new "email this article" capability), simplifying its organization, improving the graphical experience and ease of use-and you should see some results in these areas this fall, thanks in large part to the expertise volunteered by Crystal Black, a web-wonder-worker out here in Silicon Valley.

IT'S THE ECONOMY....

Financially we're doing modestly OK, given that my 9-year-old daughter keeps asking me "Is this an L-shaped recession yet??" (What ARE they learning at that school?) We're projecting making enough with the current September fund-raising to cover expenses through November but will need to start another effort in the winter.

So far the September fund-raising effort has raised about $13,000; last spring we raised over $20,000 total from our May fund-raising letter. We believe we'll get closer to the latter figure as donations trickle in. The new phenomenon re donors mentioned above means we haven't received any large amounts from any one person-so a whole lot more people are sending in the smaller amounts. But naturally we'd really like to get some larger donations again, as we want to get a bit more financially secure than just two months out, and we have some very intriguing new projects we want to get started. So, to this end, we're looking at some grants, and if you have any suggestions in this area, we'd be happy to hear them.

Our Editorial Director Justin Raimondo and Webmaster Eric Garris are currently swamped just keeping up with the US's lemming-like quest for the tides of war (sorry, couldn't help myself) and work basically 24/7 as our sole full-time employees. While we also have part-timer Jeremy Sapienza doing yoeman's work on the website and various volunteers (e.g., Sam Koritz who's been letters editor for over two years, a challenging task indeed; Mike Ewens, back for his senior year at UW in St. Louis, spearheading our student outreach program), Justin and Eric really need additional support and backup. Having Justin out this week on the road is making things tricky already! We're spread about as thin as we can be and keep doing the work we are-and for now we do rely exclusively on you to keep us going. The War Machine is now and will always be a furnace burning billions of dollars - our burn-rate is a mere charcoal briquette in comparison, but we believe we're doing extremely visible, significant work in a much more cost-efficient way. So, please, give frequently and often!

PROJECTS IN THE WORKS AND PENDING:

Justin Raimondo Speaking on Campus: Our student outreach effort is making use of the non-virtual Justin-he's going out speaking to several campuses, starting with the University of Washington in St. Louis this week. We anticipate this will be an energizing, motivating series since, as all his readers know, Justin has the passion and knowledge to fuel a four-alarm fire on the topic of non-intervention. This is pretty much a break-even effort since campus organizations typically pay travel and housing; the real cost to us is organizationally. With Justin away we need some way to keep editorial items perking along (perhaps a part-time editorial assistant).

Photographer Wanted: Antiwar.com is very strong with words - and we have about nine columnists and eight researchers to ensure that that's the case. However, the web is also a visual phenomenon, and we want to do more to convey our position with images. So we are getting a staff photographer/librarian who will do both original work and also to put together existing historical and current photographic materials and make them available on the web and as real-world items. Watching the rerun of Ken Burns' amazing Civil War series recently certainly brought home the power of images-particularly photographic images. And with about an initial $5000 (for three months work and materials) we can make a strong start at bringing some of this same power to our website, and by extension, to the anti-intervention movement.

Bibliography of libertarian books: We have books, lots of books. The Randolph Bourne Institute (RBI), of which Antiwar.com is a project, had its own summer intern organizing its approximate 2000-book library (history/politics/philosophy of the Classic Liberal/Libertarian movement) and putting 90% of it into a database. (The RBI has its library downstairs from its shared facility with Antiwar here in the Bay Area in California.) Our goal is to get these sources available for researchers and writers (including our own!) in 2003 -- and to do so we need to finish the database and obtain (or have written) a bibliography of libertarian books to understand any deficits in our current set of materials. (True, some libraries are starting to go virtual, but we have some pretty abstruse and out-of-print items that seem unlikely to be available any time soon in electronic format.) We're budgeting about $2000 for this effort.

THE MONTH IN MICRO

Finally, a quick reflection on September 2002. Antiwar.com has seen a major increase in traffic and news and opinion activity this post-9/11 year; however, we have not changed in our fundamental beliefs and principles. We do feel vindicated by events that have transpired and are transpiring (e.g., while the Taliban is gone, the people of Afghanistan have been devastated and chaos reigns; Iraq is the new about-to-be-client-state of US-as-Rome).

So we continue, as ever, covering the conflict regions of the world, seeking to give an independent, on-the-ground analysis and perspective. Key headlines this past month reflect our wide-ranging concerns: