22.01.1998

Campaign to double circulation in 1998

Katrina Haynes reports on the Weekly Worker Fighting fund

There are a million and one criticisms to be made of our paper - communists must be their own most exacting critics. Yet the key weakness that the Party as a whole has identified is the question of circulation.

Put simply, we have barely begun to scratch the surface of the potential audience for our paper. Communist Party Perspectives - agreed unanimously by the December Party aggregate - set the target of doubling Weekly Worker circulation during 1998.

The Weekly Worker is the main weapon of our Party. It is an irreplaceable vehicle for the development of communist theory and information for the working class. Just take the example of the SLP. What other paper has chronicled in such detail the fight for workers’ democracy inside Scargill’s party? Our 12-page SLP special was almost immediately snapped up in bookshops nationally, and practically every other paper on the revolutionary left have cribbed their reports of the conference from ours (the more honourable of them at least having the integrity to credit the Weekly Worker).

This ambitious target means that we must make ‘soft’ occasional readers into ‘hard’ regular subscribers. It means we have to get our paper into the hands of people who have never seen it before - but need to read it on a regular basis. We have a potential audience of tens of thousands, comrades.

To reach them, we need imaginative advertising campaigns in left journals, we must produce attractive mass publicity and drive forward a concerted campaign by branches and cells to spread the paper’s influence.

All of this is going to take money - plenty of it. The Party has ambitious plans for the Weekly Worker in 1998. We know our readership is going to support building the circulation of the best paper on the British left.

Thanks this week to Phil from Derby. He resubscribed to the paper. And then - bless him - donated £30 on top. Not only is he keeping circulation steady through subscribing as an individual: his donation is helping to build it. Thanks also to Colin (Glasgow) who sent us a cheque for £25; and to that ‘hero of socialist labour’, comrade Peter from London, who as a stalwart of Party streetwork - despite miserable weather - raised more than £50.

Keep it coming, comrades.

Katrina Haynes