(I would really like feedback on this idea from people who are interested in working with Turning the Tide, and especially if they're in cities other than Austin.)

I've only brought it up recently, but setting up "news bureaus" for Turning the Tide in different Texas cities has been on my mind for a while now. The idea is fairly straightforward: different groups of activist-reporters in different cities--Corpus Christi, Austin, Denton, Dallas, etc.--report on, edit, revise, and submit news to Turning the Tide on a monthly, bi-monthly, or on whatever basis the magazine is published. After content is received by the editorial collective in Austin, it's given a once-over to check for spelling errors, space constraints, and such. The people who physically prepare the magazine (presumably in Austin as well) then assembles this content in InDesign, takes it to the printers, and begins sending copies back out to distribute it. It might not be exactly this arrangement, but that's the general idea.

Turning the Tide's stated editorial values include decentralization and participatory democracy, and one of the magazine's stated goals is to provide a voice and organizational apparatus for people (especially Texans) seeking to disentegrate institutional failures. By establishing different bureaus in different locales, we can begin creating a federated (so to speak) activist magazine that embraces these values and works towards our goal of connecting radicals.

To spark interest in the project, we could host workshops in interested cities on certain dates. These workshops would be hosted by various people who wanted to start bureaus, and include basic advice on jumping into journalism. Jumping into advocacy journalism really isn't that hard once you have basic notions of how to write a story. The fact is, professional journalism standards are a fairly recent invention that have admittedly improved writing quality, but at the cost of homogenizing news coverage. Back in the day, it was generally expected that you read several different newspapers, from several different biased groups: the labor press, the conservatives, racial and ethnic groups, etc., all had their own newspapers. This is not a fundamentally bad idea, and no one should be afraid to attempt reporting simply because they have not done so before.

After bureaus form and begin contributing, they could purchase copies of Turning the Tide to sell locally. I need to find out how much media mail is, but it currently costs roughly a quarter to print each copy of the magazine (at least, in its 32-page, b/w format). If a bureau could scrounge up ten dollars and shipping costs, they would have about forty issues to sell.

Sell these for a buck each, or whatever the suggested cover price is. (If we bump up to a 64-page magazine, two dollars is very reasonable.) Encourage people to subscribe to it. Ten dollars yields forty dollars. For each dollar that is taken in for that particular city, give a cut back to Turning the Tide's main offices in Austin (maybe half, to cover printing costs, etc., and advance the magazine) and then let the bureau keep its own cut to either pay workers, funnel into local activist groups, or otherwise use as it sees fit. Alternatively, radical groups in Texas might simply sell the magazine as a fundraiser. Fifty-fifty might be a fair split per issue, or it might not. It's something you'd have to flesh out in practice.

On top of all this, we can also posit that a certain number of pages are set aside each issue for feature essays, interviews, and such dealing with issues and themes that affect all, or most, Texas radicals: immigration and the death penalty, for instance. We can also set aside space for book reviews, free advertisements and announcements, a directory of radical groups in Texas, and so on.

If these bureaus were set up on a large scale (say, several cities in Texas), we could promote and connect causes and events we support without relying on advertisers. And we can do so in a way that gives each chapter an incentive to contribute to and promote the magazine: namely, a piece of the pie.

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