Some Changes I Will Be Making Thanks To Your Suggestions by Caitlin Johnstone!
(2019-09-03 at 02:56:06 )

Some Changes I Will Be Making Thanks To Your Suggestions by Caitlin Johnstone

The other day I took a break from writing articles and asked my readers for some feedback on how I can best use this platform to do as much damage as possible to the oppression machine, and the response was pretty amazing.

I received around a thousand emails, comments and private messages suggesting all kinds of ideas I would never considered or had not been paying enough attention to, and now I can honestly say in all sincerity that I am more excited about this weird job of mine than I have ever been before.

Here in no particular order are some of the changes I am looking at implementing:

I am definitely going to start asking my audience for ideas and information more often.

It is absolutely stupid that I have got this giant brain pool of interesting, wise and learned minds available to me who are always eager to chip in whenever I ask, yet I hardly ever avail myself of this resource.

It is like having a super power and never using it. I have this thought every time I ask my readers to contribute stuff, but this time I have made it very conscious: the Caitlin Johnstone project is going to be much more of a two-way conversation going forward, with far more guidance from my awesome readers.

For the record I have been reading most of the comments you guys make this whole time, though I do not usually have time to respond. I am sorry I have been grossly under-utilizing this powerful resource you have all been offering me.

I will be re-starting my podcast with a few changes, and adding a video version.

The two most common suggestions I received were podcasts and videos, and when I checked in with myself about these I was surprised to notice that I am okay with it now.

Being thrust into the public spotlight with my standard-issue 44 year-old female body and a mind where my capacity for speech was damaged by abuse has always been extremely daunting for me, so I have avoided public speaking and hidden behind the written word as much as possible while healing that stuff. But the healing seems to be mostly done as far as that is concerned, and I feel much more capable now.

I actually did have a podcast going for a few months with my husband and co-conspirator Tim Foley, which I stopped because it just got too much for me.

It pretty much consisted of a discussion about whatever essay I had just written, but we decided that in our new incarnation it would be a lot more fun to talk about the news of the day and whatever else is on our mind instead.

There are always tons of subjects and news stories I do not have time to write articles about, so it would be good to have an outlet where we can just chat about the latest developments in Kashmir or Hong Kong or the Democratic Party or whatever.

So the plan is to do a podcast released in both audio and video formats consisting of three segments: an introduction and a discussion about the things that have been on our minds that day regarding the human condition and the plight of our species, then a news segment, then answer some questions from the audience.

Then maybe if we have time we will cut out little segments and circulate videos of them, too.

We will be rolling this out in the next few days, and we will keep it up for as long as it is fun and productive.

I will keep going with the near-daily written output like I have been.

Once I am comfortable with the podcast I will try accepting interview requests again.

This one was another frequent suggestion.

I have been turning down interview requests constantly because I have found them so stressful due to the aforementioned issues, but I think maybe that is behind me now.

I will probably try to bring Tim on with me too since he is just as much a part of this whole project as I am, and I have always felt like I am only presenting half of my magic whenever I have appeared alone.

Might even start interviewing people myself on our new show, who knows.

I want people translating my stuff into as many languages as possible.

I am going to keep tossing out reminders that anyone is free to re-publish any of my stuff whenever they want free of charge, and this includes translations into other languages.

If you want to just translate and circulate my work and monetize it to pull in some money for yourself, by all means please do so. No need to ask. I will keep inviting people to do this, and just generally to share my work around if they feel so motivated.

I will probably use memes more.

Whenever I have got a solid line in an article that conveys a key idea I am going to try and put it in a shareable graphic like I did at the end of my last article.

A lot of people who will not read a full article will still ingest a line of text presented in an interesting way.

I might start doing more humor-satire pieces.

This was another suggestion that came up a few times.

Humor is a great way to get a message across, which is why the propagandists have been trying to use it. It is always going to be a populist and anti-authoritarian medium though, so we should try and use it more.

I find humor articles much easier and faster to write than serious research pieces, so if it is an effective way to open some eyes I should definitely start looking in that direction more often.

I will start posting regular collections of random thoughts.

This was another cool suggestion I had not thought of before.

Lots of people do not do Twitter, and even if they do they are not paying attention to all my Twitter posts.

Maybe once every week or two I will collect all my stand-alone thoughts that I put into tweets and other places and compile them in an article for anyone who is interested.

Those are the changes I am definitely going to look to implement, and there are a few other potentials I am toying with as well.

These all look very feasible without being too taxing on my time and energy.

Thank you all so much for your wonderful suggestions, and thank you for caring so much that you desired to offer them.

I try not to get all gushy and meta too often, but I really do have the best audience in the world and I deeply appreciate you guys. I am very excited about where this is all going.

Thanks for reading!!
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