Linking the Progressive Youth Movement

Cross posted at MyDD

The media life of the CTYD YouTube video was informative to watch. It's the first time (that I can think of) that a democratic youth operation successfully used new media and the blogs to get out a story that didn't have a coordinated national push already behind it.

The story started as a press release about a CT House vote, leaked into a local media outlet, became a YouTube video, found its way into more local media including a CT blog, became a blog topic here on Future Majority, got diaried at the Daily Kos where it was front paged, and then traveled into more national blogs. What could have been a one day local story was potentially seen by a large swath of online progressives and CT residents, and it worked because CT Young Dems delivered a creative message and also because the story cycled through the local and national blogs. It's a model to replicate, and has been promoted as such both here and on the Young Democrats Blog.

So how we can make it even more replicable? How can local youth organizers increase the reach of their stories? When best practices like this arise, how can they get in front of as many of the relevant eyeballs as possible?

There seems to be two pretty simple solutions:

1. First, local chapters of youth organizations should actively engage their local blogs.
2. Second, the progressive youth organizations that have blogs should start blog-rolling each other and reading each other's blogs on a daily basis.

We've all seen the numbers on rising youth turnout and witnessed the explosion of new youth organizations these last 4 years. The progressive youth movement is growing fast, but its still fairly siloed - internally from each other, and externally from the larger progressive movement.

Engaging with local bloggers could build mutually beneficial relationships that link youth organizing to the local netroots and activist communities. These relationships are valuable not only as a vehicle to spread a message, but also in creating a more cohesive local progressive community, of which youth organizing is a vital piece. That's an easy way to link the progressive youth movement to the larger movement.

Connecting via blogroll (or just plain links - not every youth org has a blog) and reading each other's blogs - and more importantly informing members about the activities (and blogs) of partner organizations - will help best practices spread (more) virally among organizations, and give those members gain an understanding of the larger progressive youth movement. (It will also bump up all of our Google and Technorati ranks to boot, which is nice).

I know that the Executive Directors and national staffers of many youth orgs do communicate with each other on a regular basis. However, the progressive youth movement is bigger than those few people, and relying on those individual networks for the exchange of information and best practices can create unnecessary bottlenecks that impede our growth.

I don't mean to suggest that these practices things aren't already in use. There are some exceptions, to be sure. Forward Montana and the state blog Left in the West, for example, are both run by Matt Singer. So in Montana politics these connections already exist. The Young Democrats do a decent job aggregating the blogs written by their local chapters on their national site. In turn, those chapter blogs do at times link up with the local blogosphere or other youth orgs. But these are exceptions, not the rule. But looking around the websites of progressive youth organizations, I don't get the sense that this is happening in any coordinated or intentional manner. Right now its scatter-shot, with some folks adopting these practices and others not. It should be standard operating procedure for all youth orgs.

What I've suggested are very simple changes that offer a potentially large return on investment for what amounts to some quick HTML work and an extra 15 minutes of media scanning every day.

Lists of state blogs and progressive youth blogs after the jump.

State Blogs

Thanks to MyDD, whose source code I cut and pasted to get these state blog links, and to the State Blog Roundup for sparking this blog post. If anyone has a good link to a comprehensive "best practices for engaging bloggers," please leave a link in the comments.

• Alabama
• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Indiana
• Iowa
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Massachusetts
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Montana
• Nebraska
• New Hampshire
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• New York
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Ohio
• Oklahoma
• Pennsylvania
• Rhode Island
• South Dakota
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Texas
• Utah
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Pacific Northwest
• Sunbelt
• West

Youth Blogs

This list is slim pickings for sure. Not every youth org out there needs to have a blog (and not every org does, obviously). Some of the blogs listed here are actually group blogs, and some, like YDA, actually have local blogs for each chapter - far more than I could list here.

• Campus Progress
• College Democrats
• Roosevelt Institution
• Students for a New American Politics
• Young Democrats of America
• Young People For