You probably saw a huge number of blog posts last week from new Daily Kos members you had never heard of before, and thought—where did they all come from?
As the Daily Kos staffer running our diarist recruitment program, I plead guilty.
Daily Kos wants to recruit thousands of new community writers. And we are asking our established community to welcome these writers, show them the ropes, engage them and—yes—learn from them even as they learn from you.
We need to grow Daily Kos specifically—and progressive media in general—because the biggest problem facing progressives today is the "engagement gap" between conservatives and progressives.
There may well be more people who agree with progressives than conservatives, as presidential elections have shown. However, as all other elections, contacting elected officials, and watching the news have shown, conservatives are more likely to do something about their beliefs.
The results of the engagement gap were made plain in the 2010 and 2014 elections.
There are lots of causes for the engagement gap, but two of the big ones are (1) far more conservatives consume news than progressives, and (2) conservative media is far larger than progressive media.
In every medium, from Fox News to Rush Limbaugh to the Wall Street Journal and even to digital outlets like the Drudge Report, right-wing media dwarfs progressive media.
If you are consuming news, you are far more likely to take political action. And on that score, conservatives are way ahead of us. We need to grow.
So how do we grow? Well, earlier this year, we discovered that there is a strong correlation between the number of diaries and diarists on Daily Kos and the number of people we reach.
In fact, it had the strongest correlation of any other factor we examined. The more people we have writing, the bigger we get and the more we can close the engagement gap.
So where do we get new writers? We have 1.8 million people on our Daily Kos e-mail list (and 936,000 fans on our Facebook page), most of whom have signed our petitions or taken other political action. Why not start urging them to also write informative, thought-provoking essays at Daily Kos?
On January 8, we sent out our first recruitment e-mail to 400,000 people on our email list. We sent the recruitment email to people who already have an active Daily Kos account and people who don’t have an account, but who have proven to be the cream of the crop—the most active of all our subscribers.
The chart above shows the spike in new users that this e-mail generated. We then sent four more e-mails to this group, each of which had a specific discussion question. By January 22, we had 315 blog posts—way above the normal weekday total of 200.
Let me tell you right now—this is only the beginning. There are going to be a lot of new people writing around here.
But we can’t make this project a success without the active help of our long standing community of regular diarists & commenters, so we are asking two things from you:
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Help out these new writers: Some of these new folks may not fully understand how the Daily Kos community operates. If you think a diary could use some improvement, offer helpful & encouraging suggestions in the comments to encourage them to do a better job. You can also direct them to our community's vast resources to help our users become better writers.
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Tell us what topics you want the new people to write about: We plan to send out two emails a week to this group of new and potential writers, with questions on a news topic that we hope will provoke some good writing. Up until now, we have asked them to weigh in on the Democratic presidential primary (Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary Clinton), because the Iowa caucus is next week and our community members have opinions.
But what other topics do you want to see more of at Daily Kos? If we are recruiting these new writers, what do you want them to write about? Please leave your ideas in the comments of this diary, and we will use your input for future recruitment e-mails.
Personally, I’m a fan of first-person blog posts—where people tell us their life story that has guided how they view a certain political issue. Writing at Daily Kos can be intimidating, because we have a lot of very smart people here.
But nobody is a bigger expert on your own life story than you. As we saw in the campaigns for marriage equality and immigration reform, the “story of self” is a very persuasive and effective way at moving hearts and minds.
As someone who discovered Daily Kos in 2003 and joined its staff in 2013, I am very excited about this project. It took me two years of religiously checking on this website every day before I realized that anyone can set up a Daily Kos account and start blogging. I know that we have a lot more passionate progressive people out there who need to join our community.
I'm happy to stick around and answer questions in the comments.