More Free Wisdom from the Chief-Blogger of the Dean Campaign

Jon Stahl and a handful of good people in the PNW environmental community have been working hard on the importance of generating your own story to distribute. This strategy should increasingly be used by environmental nonprofit organizations as it becomes easier for nonprofit groups to develop "news" and send it directly to audiences via electronic tools (email, newsletters, xml feeds ). Jon has an older blog post that is worth digging up in light of this new post

Dogwood really understand the advocacy power of making news, and commenting in real-time on breaking news. And they're putting that understanding into action. Check out what they're doing -- I really think it's a model for small grassroots advocacy groups.

Jon has linked to and teased out some great wisdom from Interview with Matthew Gross, Howard Dean's (former) blogger-in-chief.

Jon and I tease pretty much the same wisdom from the interview.

What this means is that people are going to have more options to get involved in national politics. It also means that campaigns are going to have to become their own media channels, and find ways to reach out to an increasingly segmented American audience. Campaigns will have to decentralize as the electorate becomes more decentralized. And I think the Dean campaign has shown the way for other campaigns to do that.

The Internet has the ability to nationalize any race.

But the Internet's not a trick. You still need a good candidate with a good message.

And the media still exerts an enormous influence. That influence can be countered by the Internet, but the Net doesn't eliminate it.

This is a great set of insights and builds on the path that both GMT and OneNW are working to promote across the movement. The real challenge is to methodically plan campaigns to adopt to these tactics, to plot new campaign strategy and to figure out how to decentralize your campaign while also making sure that you have the talent, good message and core team needed skilled and equipped to work with traditional media and execute the campaign.