It is not quite March, but this
month’s mentions are mostly media material.
That is because the CESJ core group is trying to get up to speed on all
the projects we want to complete or get moved well along for the current
year. It’s just a coincidence that it
all seems to deal with media, traditional, social, and otherwise:
 |
| Father William Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. |
• CESJ Media Outreach. The
CESJ core group has been making great strides in developing materials for its
media outreach. The “new” website is, of
course, obvious, but the work on other projects proceeds apace. The newsletter is still on schedule for
launching by the end of this month, while the Ferree compendium and What Happened to Social Justice are
being steadily edited. The Silver
Anniversary Edition of Curing World
Poverty is on course, although a definite date has not yet been set for its
release. All in all, things are looking
up for the New Year.
• Video Project. An
important feature of the media outreach project will be the short instructional
videos, the first of which, a 90-second overview in rhyme of the Just Third
Way, is still in development. Why does
it take so long to produce a minute and a half of video? For one thing, the easier something looks, it’s
a good bet the harder it was to do!
Also, as we’re looking toward a long-term relationship with the
production company we’re using, we’re finding our “voice” and “look” so that
all the videos have the same “feel” (have we tossed in enough jargon for you?).
• Other Videos. We are also
exploring the possibility of producing short “Justice University” videos, each
covering one subject as a stand-alone piece that people can view in odd moments
without having to commit large amounts of time to taking an entire Just Third
Way course that lasts hours every week for six months. Informal studies have suggested that people
will watch a 15-minute informative video who would never sign up for a class,
even a completely free one, and actually retain what they’ve learned from the
short piece better than most of what they learned in college or high school.
• Book Trailers. We have drafted three book trailers so far and are
editing them for conversion into video format so that people can share them
more easily and spread them out among their networks. A “book trailer,” by the way, is a short
video about a book (obviously) that is like the movie trailers you see in
theaters about upcoming attractions, except it’s about a book (obviously). Book trailers are generally much shorter than
movie trailers, usually thirty seconds to a minute and a half at most. The idea is not to summarize the book, but to
interest you in reading it, just as a movie trailer is to get you to want to
watch the film. So far we have trailers drafted
for Easter
Witness, Freedom
Under God, and Ten
Battles Every Catholic Should Know (from another publisher,
obviously). Also in process is a trailer
for What Happened to Social Justice,
a book which (as noted above) is still in editing.
• Getting Involved. While
the CESJ core group is working very hard to get materials prepared, we can have
the best materials in the world, and it won’t do a bit of good if they don’t
get circulated. We depend on the CESJ
network to help spread the word around through the social media and whatever
other networks people have.
• Truth Be Told. The Truth Be Told newsletter, which often
featured Just Third Way material, may be coming closer to a relaunch. Since the final decision relies on people
other than those involved in publishing the newsletter, we have no word on when
it may get started again. For some reason
people who don’t have to do the work on a project are often very accommodating
with other people’s time and resources.
• Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making
your purchases through the Amazon Smile
program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your Amazon account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice Arlington.” If you type anything else, you will either
get no results or more than you want to sift through. Once you’ve typed (or copied and pasted) “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you will be taken to
the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 35 different
countries and 39 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, the United
Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and India. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Ronald
Reagan . . . Communist?” “The Real
Issue,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 05,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” and “A
Challenge to Civilization.”
Those are the happenings for this
week, at least those that we know about.
If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a
note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into
the next “issue.” If you have a short
(250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the
blog — do not send them to us to post for you.
All comments are moderated, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#
