1. MEMBERSHIP BUILDING

MISSION: attract new members.

The bread and butter of PMWatch is its membership. The more members we have, the better we will be able to implement our mission at all three levels.

In a way, parallel to the ultimate challenge of bringing out fundamental change in media coverage, is the challenge of motivating people to join, work, and stick with the effort. The easiest nut to crack is to convince people to join; less easy is to get them to actually work at a task; and hardest is to convince them to keep working. Of course, as a group, it is OUR challenge to push all of these membership issues forward.

2. PAPER WATCH GROUPS

MISSION: establish one watch group for each paper and manage – at high level – the various groups.

These groups, as I said, serve as our point of sustained, one-to-one contact with the papers. The aim is to build as many such groups as possible, and have them work independently, in a franchise sort of fashion, all adhering to the PMWatch standards and the PMWatch methodology. At this point, I am pushing to have people take the major papers, with the goal of covering the 10 largest papers by the end of September.

3. PUBLISHING DRIVE

MISSION: solicit essays from authors and supply them to the Paper Watch Groups.

Another drive PMWatch is pushing now is that of landing pieces on the pages of the major papers. This drive is coordinated with the Paper Watch groups and its aim is to keep a steady stream of alternatives going at the papers, so that they can no longer use the excuse of "we don't get enough publishable pieces" (another example of helping them get rid of bad habits!).

4. ARTICLES AND ESSAYS DATABASE BUILDING

MISSION: build a database of articles and papers that will help the gadflies and other participants in their mission of keeping the media honest and objective.

This refers to the job of our features editor. Again, the sea of articles and material in a perverse way works against us: by picking out the most important pieces of documents and making crucial information readily available to people, we have helped people get at what they need fast -- and in many cases, helped them accomplish something they may have had to abandon out of sheer confusion.

5. PRIMERS AND REPORTS

MISSION: build and maintain basic material about the crisis and the conflict that will help gadflies do their job right. This group digests material made available by PMWatch (reports, feature article, essays, etc.) and packages it conveniently.

The goal here is similar to 4, except that we go one step further and package things for an audience: e.g., press kits, gadfly kits, map kits, etc.

6. MATERIAL DISTRIBUTION

MISSION: Distribute pmwatch information and material to journalists, scholars -- reports, findings, surveys, etc.

Having information ready to be consumed is not good enough if our aim is to PUSH. We need to literally PUSH this information onto people, and not just have it ready when they need it. After all, the main hurtle -- as any ad person will tell you -- is make people aware that we exist.

7. OUTREACH -- ALLIANCE BUILDING WITH OTHER GROUPS AND ASSOCIATIONS

MISSION: Establish contact with other organizations and nurture relationships with them

A skill that various groups working independently need to acquire is that of building relationships/partnerships with other groups. ADC, Al-Awda, AAI, NileMedia, ElectronicIntifada, etc., should exert their respective and collective imaginations to find a way to collaborate without compromising independence. A challenge, but the effort of striking a working balance is probably worth it ten times over.