Following the threads on indymedia and anarkismo I think we should have one!
libcom.org/news has been going for about a month now. I'm starting this thread to encourage people to contribute content for it (see below), and get some feedback and general ideas for ways to improve it.
In terms of content, there's a few things we're after:
1. If you're in a local group or national fed, it'd be great to have your news. You can make a login for your group, and articles will be listed with a link to your profile. Here's freedom's for an example. And an article from Hackney Independent's winter newsletter: http://libcom.org/news/article.php?story=haggerston-west-kingsland-hackney
This allows people to see what's going on around the country without having to navigate to all the different sites, and hopefully /news will develop and build it's own audience. It also means your news will appear on sites like newsnow, google news and any other sites which syndicate us. This means potentially a lot more people reading stuff you put out.
2. If something interesting is happening 'round your way, say a campaign against a city academy or a firefighters strike or whatever, post up a short report. In many cases this could just be a short rewrite/summary of an article from the local paper - or even just repost the whole thing if it's alright - we've got newswire editors who'll check if it's suitable and make sure the formatting is ok before it gets posted.
3. longer more in-depth pieces, although obviously this takes the most work. If you're interested get in touch.
There's notes and guidelines for posting news here:
http://libcom.org/news/staticpages/index.php?page=notes-posting-news
These are the three main areas we want to concentrate on:
1. Stories about people taking collective direct action to improve their lives.
2. Libertarian and working class analysis and perspective on current events, such as wars, natural disasters and other big mainstream news stories.
3. News about the effects of corporate and government policies on people and the environment.
I never used to post much up on the old newswire, but I've got really enthusiastic about the new one and have been putting up as much stuff as I can find/have time for.
In terms of feedback. Any comments appreciated really - appearance, content, categories, ease of use.
Can comment on articles and discussions
I like the content that's there at the moment. A couple of ideas
* how about some rss feeds? (they can be a good way of spotting news that you want to copy to the site if nothing else).
* I'm not sure if having so many different CMSes as part of libcom is a good idea. For one thing it creates a fairly fractured feel to the place - like a load of unrelated sites sharing the same place and makes things like interlinking of content more difficult (eg linking from news articles to books / history articles with similar topics). For another thing, the long-term technical maintenance problems might be considerable.