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Creating connections between movements: the first four months of the Philly Activist News [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-19
The Philly Activist News — the first four months of publication!
Our report…
With the coming inauguration in 2025, a small group of Philly-area activists flew into action in December.
We knew that there would be a huge influx of protestors (or at least we hoped!) like with the Women’s March in 2016. But we didn’t want to see that energy dissipated again.
We wanted to reduce barriers to entry to activism. So we started the Philly Activist News, an aggregator to bring local social justice movements together.
We were hoping to channel the coming rage!
Activists who can get more involved should be able to find their “activist home,” so they can get plugged into a longer-term struggle, on whatever issue.
The biggest complaint we saw on local Reddits was people commenting, “I wish I had known about this protest so I could attend!” so we were hoping to address that. Reducing barriers to entry.
Participation in democracy is everything. We are all overworked. How do we make it easier for people to participate and have their voices heard?
We designed a quick site on Wordpress, using one of the free news site themes (Newsmatic.) We set up a free plugin for a weekly newsletter, a free translation plugin, a free contact form plugin..., and got going! Total build time was 3 weeks.
We set up the site by category, and started posting upcoming meetings, webinars, protests.
Eventually we needed to create a calendar, because there was so much!
People get activated about different stuff so we tried to cover a lot of different communities.
Philly is also very neighborhood-centric, so we have tried to cover all neighborhoods (especially anything in the more Trumpy areas.)
The social media landscape is so atomizing. You can be the most passionate activist about climate change and never know what’s going on in education fairness, just because of the channelization of the media.
But we have to pull strength from each other!
Sometimes one movement will make great strides, while another movement will feel stuck in the mud. But we if all keep pulling together, and relying on each other, we can support each other and keep going. It’s all the same struggle, for our humanity, and for a more loving and peaceful world.
The MAGA people make so much noise. They are deafening, and the capitalist media just amplifies them.
There is very little media showing the other voices, the opposition.
We had to highlight that. To answer their greed with our self-respect, our strength and sanity, our demands. We will protect this country from these sociopaths.
Indivisible has done extraordinary things this year — they get a lot of credit for holding democracy together — but something their national office said early on troubled us. They told their national membership that under Trump 2.0, we should not be proposing our own policies. That this would be four years on the defensive.
We disagreed.
If you don’t have an alternative vision, if you are not rooted in what you want to see happen, you cannot live. To spend four years saying “no” is just arguing on their terms.
They already own the capitalist media. We own our own minds, and our own ideas. They are better, and more beautiful, and humane. We meet their lies with our truth.
We worked out some principles in highlighting posts:
We focused on collaboration. Bringing people together. For example, an article about labor and veterans coming together, or new strategies for immigration and labor to support each other. This is partially to replace the in-person networking that used to go on much more often. We highlight in-person gatherings as much as we can.
We highlight grassroots and smaller groups. The larger political groups that are so critical — like the ACLU or Sierra Club — generally have their own communication staff. We post their materials and events, and really try to maximize their trainings. But smaller and grassroots groups need more support. We can help them in their communications efforts! So we try to balance those things out.
We highlighted emerging issues that are hard to understand for most people. Most have to do with big tech, which wields enormous power with almost no oversight. The coming impact of AI is a big one. We are looking for perspectives! The role of social media in the breakdown of international democracy. The unbelievable corruption in crypto.
We spread info on how we can use technology for social justice! Any tool they use, we can use too. There is more to be said — we would love more input and ideas! Here’s a start from Higher Ground on AI for Democratic and progressive campaigns.
Most of what we link to is political organizations, but we do also post media references. We purposefully highlight alternative media! We make reference to articles on organizing strategies in Daily Kos, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, In these Times, the Nation, the Progressive, Wired, anyone doing the great work. These media institutions are the backbone of our movement. We absolutely must support them.
We have traffic of a couple thousand visitors now, a growing email list. We have social profiles on Bluesky and Instagram but haven’t figured out how to maximize them yet.
Our next big goal, hopefully, is to knit our community together with more profiles. We really want the site, ideally, to be a way where people can learn more about activist history and meet other activists. That’s a long term goal, depending on capacity.
Anyway — check us out!
And subscribe to our weekly newsletter!
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