starting up a class struggle newsletter--looking for tips, ideas, etc.

one of the best local newsletters i've seen in the UK is the Hereford Heckler, a good mix of news, humour and local sport with a good clean design. basically have a look at other ones and see what they do that works (e.g. the news in briefs on the front of the Heckler helps draw in readers imho). One of the biggest and easiest mistakes to make is to use jargon that's obscure to your readers, which can lead to a subcultural readership without realising it. for example the last SolFed Catalyst had a headline reading 'Sweep ISS out of SOAS' - i know what that means and it's still obscure; handing it out at the local train station elicited a lot of baffled looks (i think it was a holding headline that got left in by mistake).

unfortunately this time it was the correct one.

There are some practical tips in the media section of our organise Page:
http://libcom.org/organise

One thing that I would comment is that if you are doing a local newsletter, especially if you are writing new content for it, that you put it online as well so it can get out to a wider audience, and people can come across it via Google searches, etc - libcom is available to use as online archive for this purpose, so feel free to post stuff here!

Ever happened to Halifax anarchists and it was a total failure. There is nothing in Halifax for revolutionaries unless they address how shitty anarchists treated each other, other revolutionaries and non-politicals. You know that not everyone is against me, and that it's no accident that the most well read as well as the nonpoliticals either took my side or have distanced themselves from the anarchists.

I won't keep bringing this up if you don't want to talk about it, I understand why. But these were your friends and ignoring it doesn't make the problem go away.

(sorry for the two posts, I tried to correct something but am typing on a phone and can't scroll down)

Maybe so, but I think class struggle is irrelevent if it's taken up by folks who can't get along in groups of more than ten folks. These were people involved in the atlantica black bloc, so I can imagine that any class struggle group in Halifax will be composed of folks who think accusing people of rape is a part of class struggle, or it will be their friends. People who are friends with snitches and liars have no place in class struggle. The people that did this were the class warriors in Halifax, and it occurred during two of there events. Are you saying that how revolutionaries treat other people is irrelevent if they publish a solid classwar rag? I don't know who else is involved but I wouldn't consider anyone involved with hcap, apart from smg, to have any understanding of class struggle from an anarchist or communist point of view. There is also a history of people treating others like shit in Halifax, and I'm assuming that this publication will involve at least one or two of these people. Class struggle is irrelevent when it's composed of people who treat each other worse than everyday people treat each other. If people can't tolerate minor personal crises then what's the point of trying to go beyond that? The united states is full of people in struggle who snitch when faced with jail time. In Halifax we have insurrectionary anarchists who threaten to snitch on people over personal squabbles. Why should they go any further? You're right Joseph, this should be discussed, but it has not been discussed and moving forward with a zine like this would indicate that people just don't care. You're not from here so maybe you don't realize that all the shit that has happened is more important than class struggle headlines. If anarchists could learn one thing from all this it should be that your personal relationships come before anarchist struggle, otherwise all that organizing is for nothing. You can't create a better society with a bunch of people who treat each other like shit.

People do like to read opinion and opinionated reporting, I'm assuming that most of the articles will be local analysis and reportage of local struggles. Keeping it first person makes it more interesting imho...
In other words, avoid stuff like 3rd person reporting which sounds like- Janitors organized! Victory for working class and Union Local Blah Blah Blah... vs a first person account from a rank-and-file janitor describing their involvement in an organizing drive would be more interesting imho
*edit* also, I'd assume, winning 'union recognition' would be the least interesting aspect of such a hypothetical story, the story of the conditions people worked under and how people fight against that and win demands (of which winning formal union representation may or may not be particularly significant) in their particular context would be most interesting.

gotta start somewhere! you'd be surprised how many people are drawn to a decent class struggle anarchist presence once it's there - quite a few, probably half of our current members in Brighton said that they'd wanted to be involved in stuff but there wasn't a decent group. so better to be a small group going in the right direction than a larger irrelevant, dead-end one.

Why not have a section called something to the effect of "Interview With A Working Class Hero" in which you have a sit down interview with a regular working guy. You could highlight the personal struggles of people in your community who aren't necessarily anarchists or activists and at the same time you could ask them direct questions about anarchism so that you could also gain some perspective on what issues need to be more clearly addressed in terms of helping the working class better understand what anarchism is really all about and why it would be a preferable option for them. What do you think?