Y'all want to learn how you can get these tiny reprintable zines with subjects like 'Decolonize Your Mind,' 'Junk Forensic Science,' and 'What is Money' into your community? Great, stick around because I'm going to explain Operation Newsstand in detail. And this is your invitation to come and participate.

We're trying to undermine the billionaire monopolies on media with something simple, physical, that we can generate resources around. So we can invest them in community support infrastructure, and more expensive to produce means of communication.


Without further ado, "Operation Newsstand, or OpStand for Short: a Community Info. Alternative:"


So we're taking simple, humble zines. We're putting them into a supply chain that is regionally organized that goes from zine makers, to regional libraries, to newsies to our entire communities. And then we're interconnecting all of these trees into a national information forest.

That's what Operation Newsstand is for, it's like the network part. So right now we're growing zine trees.

A zine tree is a local supply chain to get these zines in the communities.They come in three different sizes. We're introducing the new sizes now and we're just getting into like regular old publishing territory.


So the way it works is zine makers create digital files of these little zines, medium, and larger zines. Here, this is an example of a large one with some text on it. They send them into their regional libraries who vet them for accuracy, spelling, formatting, and then make them available to all of the newsies in your region for free.


Let me be clear, all of our libraries are free to access. Pay if you can because a lot of labor goes into them and we'd really like to be able to eat and pay rent but that's up to you guys to decide if you value this enough to give that to us.


So the newsies put their labor into printing these digital zines into these physical formats and then distributing them to their communities as described in this diagram.

So you got the digital printable PDFs. Those go to the libraries, those go out to the newsies, the newsies turn them into physical zine copies, and those get out to the community members, and you get all sorts of community benefits from it.


It informs local communities. It teaches us to take value and ownership of our labor and attention. It lets us use material resources for the strength and enrichment of our communities. It lets people own physical information that can't be easily taken, changed, and doesn't require internet or electricity to access in emergencies. It fills in some of the gaps intentionally left by the American educational system, which has been really cool.

It's built on the principle from each according to their ability to each according to their need. It's an attempt to directly undercut the attention theft economy created with billionaire-owned media.

It's one of the ways we can put our valuable time and attention into community instead of whatever lets billionaires profit, which is what we're doing now. Case in point, the caliber of discourse since the election and really before it. It's a place for communities to form and spread their own ideas and narratives outside of like super rich people's influence.


What we're doing is making an easily accessible means of production and supply line that people can put their labor into and get something of value out of that they can support their communities by doing.

They make a great fundraising and marketing tool for local organizations or you can use them to fundraise for local individuals who need material support.

Individual activists can sell them to support their activism as they survive in capitalism and people who can afford to spare the labor and the printing costs can give them out for free because they're frankly really cheap to produce and also, normally, your local library will give you some amount of free pages per day or per week that you can print out just using your library card.

And by printing these out at your local library, you'll increase their budget because their budgets are determined based on how many people go to the library and use their services. So if you go and use their services, not only do we get to create our own little libraries that are ungovernable, because of how decentralized and non-official they are, you get to support existing libraries who already contribute so much to your community.


The crux, the really tricky part of all of this, is how do they survive in capitalism?


In short, you guys gotta value it!


Community members purchase the physical zines from a Newsy or a local library. If they can't afford the Newsie fee, they get the zine for free from the source library.

If you want an example of how this works, check out covenprint.com. We've got a shop that's full of token copies of the zines, which are purposely up marked to represent the labor that we do in the library and that the makers did to get the zines created. And we've got a free library right next to it with all of the same titles.

So if you can't buy a particular zine, you download it. And when you buy a particular zine, you still download it. Because the point is for these to be reprinted and distributed in your community.

So newsies that have decided to sell these to their communities can purchase the token hard copies that they want to from the library to support the makers who are giving them the resource that they can multiply into more value for themselves.

This keeps the whole library of titles available for anyone who needs them and allows us to eat and sleep somewhere safe while we're doing all of this in capitalism.


The librarians divide that $7 fee between making labor, library labor, and folding labor. We recommend $3 to makers, $2 to $3 to whoever folds, and $1 to $2 for library materials and library labor.

Then zine makers get passive income that supports and incentivizes them to create more zines for their community, and everyone gets informed and has access to a means of improving their quality of life, whether that's through educating themselves or owning the product of their labor, which is not something that we're normally allowed to do.

Our libraries are pay-if-you-can, and the little bit y'all can pay lets us keep these trees alive so what we're doing now is growing a zine forest what's a zine forest a grassroots network of groups sharing user-created zines with their communities connected through a root system like opstand so they can pool resources support and protect one another as they spread censored information we need you.

We need zine makers, artists, educators, and researchers who create the reprintable zines and send those files to the regional libraries for distribution.

We need librarians. We especially need librarians. Librarians, we especially need you right now.

We are fleshing out our entire network and we are accepting submissions for libraries. And we are ready to connect you to all of the things that you need to get started in this.

We also need newsies. So zine makers and newsies, you can go to Covenprint for now.

And in a week, I'll start sending you over to Opstand where you can find, like, everything you need and all of the libraries local to you.


New zines are going to need activists, community makers, and local retailers, organizers who print and fold and distribute the physical zines for free or for a small fee, depending on what the person's individual needs are. Whether they can give the labor away for free or whether they need to be supported in it.


We need these in every region of the United States because we're trying to make this dream a reality. And I really think we can, given that in just a few months we got all these ones together.


So I think the more that we do this, the better.

Stay tuned. There's going to be a lot more announcements coming fast.

I'm also excited to talk about all the new submissions that we have because I have not been able to as I've been doing all the standard operating procedure for Operation Newsstand.

Just stay tuned.