[flamingswordofjustice]

Flaming Sword moving to DC this July!

Exciting news: The Flaming Sword of Justice is moving to Washington, DC.

That's right. Your favorite show about people changing the world, powered by MoveOn, will be broadcasting from Washington, DC.

On July 11, Beth, Mac, and Ben are moving to DC's NoMa neighborhood, by the H Street corridor. The newly-minted Dr. Elizabeth McCarthy Wikler will serve as a Congressional Fellow of the American Sociological Association, working on the Hill. Mac will learn how a bill becomes a law. And Ben will plunge the Flaming Sword's signature swashbuckling style of social-justice storytelling directly into the heart of U.S. politics. We're pumped!

So:

Goodbye party in New York! You're invited. It'll be at 8pm on Wednesday, June 26 at Sharlene's in Brooklyn! RSVP here. Spread the word!

DC folks: we're hiring! Know any totally amazing people who would like to have the time of their lives changing the world by reinventing progressive media and online organizing? Do they have the chops to be the show's Executive Producer or Digital Media Specialist? Have you already sent them those links? If not, why not? THANKS!

New Yorkers hiring for shows: talent available! The Sword's move to DC means that two fantastic staffers are on the market: powerhouse producer Shelly Darden and astonishingly accomplished audio engineer Mauricio Escamilla. My only consolation in losing them is knowing that they'll do such great work with you. Please let me know if I can introduce you to them!

We'll miss our community in Brooklyn. But we're thrilled about this next chapter. Hope to see you soon.

Warmly,

Ben Wikler and the Flaming Sword of Justice team

PS: We (or at least I plus Flaming Sword of Justice Hacker in Residence Brian Guthrie) will also be at Netroots Nation, broadcasting live on We Act Radio 1480 AM in DC and online at flamingswordofjustice.com, so if you're there, stop

PPS: If you've been looking for the right moment to subscribe to the Flaming Sword's emails and podcast, might I suggest... right now?

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The Sword of Justice: it's aflame.

Lots of news. We've got an office. We've hired a team. An awesome team. We're on the air. Every day. 3pm ET. We've launched our website: And we've got bit stuff in store. Stay tuned! – Ben and the crew, 19 March 2013

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Wanted: a room in NYC, to set up a studio

Are you in New York? Do you have a spare room or two? Do you love justice? If the answer to each of those question is "Yes! Absolutely!" then I've got great news for you: you could become the proud host of the Flaming Studios of Justice, exclusive headquarters of earth's premier change-the-world podcast and radio program.

Our needs, detailed below, are fairly simple. For you, our host, the potential benefits are many:

You'll have easy access to an audio recording studio, a professionally-lit photo studio, and a video broadcasting studio. If you need to occasionally make videos, take gorgeous photos (of yourself, your staff, your visitors), or appear via video on far-away shows, what could be better than friendly folks setting up all the gear for that stuff right in your office, for free?

You could become a guest of The Flaming Sword of Justice! We love all of our guests, but we love our in-studio guests most of all. So if you're an activist, politico, muckraking journalist, mad scientist, or other world-changer type, you might have stories our audience would love. And working ten feet from our studio makes you a very appealing guest. Or maybe you're a consultant, with terrific guests as clients. Perfect! They can experience a life-changing interview right there in their office!

You'll have fascinating and inspiring people visiting on a daily basis. The Flaming Sword of Justice books people who are changing the world. If you like those people, you'll love hosting the show.

We'll probably wind up helping you win the Internet. The Flaming Sword of Justice team is very, very good at Internetting. And we enjoy helping people solve problems in our spare time. Our water-cooler conversations could make your world a better place.

Sounds fantastic, right? Right! So, what is it that we're looking for?

A private, quiet-ish room, of 300-800 square feet. It doesn't have to super quiet (our mics are good at only listening to what we tell them to listen to), but the walls need to reach the ceiling and there shouldn't be trains rumbling by all the time. It shouldn't be too echo-y, although we can fix that if the room is self-contained.

The other thing we care about is—you guessed it, real estate professionals!—location. We need to be subway-convenient. The ideal area for us would be lower Manhattan or Brooklyn, but midtown could work as well.

That's it!

We'll generally have 4-6 staff working in the room during working hours, plus 1-3 guests coming in and out--generally during our live broadcast, which will be 3-4pm each weekday.

If you'd like to talk, please email us at [email protected]. We can't wait to read your message.

Or if you know anyone in New York City, please send them this post, and share it on Facebook!

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This page you're looking at? It's the show's blog. The page you want? The show's website.

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How can I volunteer for the show remotely?

I've gotten a couple of emails from folks who don't live in New York, but want to help the show. First of all, you rule! Thanks for being such great people! Secondly, yup--we could totally use your help. Here are a few ways you could pitch in. If any of these pop for you, email us at [email protected] with...

the areas of our need where you'd like to help (or if we don't realize we need a certain kind of help, but we do, mention that!)

a quick note about your background doing that sort of thing and an example of where you did it (you could just get started on helping out and send your first chunk of work!)

a rough sense of your availability: hours-ish per week, start and end date if any, how much you're available on demand vs have a highly structured calendar

anything we should know about how to work well with you as a remote volunteer--ideally, an example of something that worked well in the past, and something that didn't.

That all will really help us make sure we use your time well, and ours.

Okay! Here's some stuff we need help with.

Graphic design. We need business cards. T-shirts. We need a slightly adjusted logo that works in the "powered by MoveOn.org" more cleanly in a square. We need an avatar (a square icon to use on Twitter etc) and a Favicon. Fairly soon, we'll need help designing a killer Prezi or Keynote presentation explaining how the Flaming Sword of Justice works (there's more than meets the eye!) that we can take around to potential partners of the show.

Web design. We need a gorgeous email template. We need an online merch store. We need lots of web design advice and assistance on our show website, which is currently under development. We need design for our various pages on other sites: Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. Yay web design!

Web testing and QA. We're launching an ambitious new site, soon. We need people to try to break it, to load it in every browser and operating system combination they can think of, and to tell us what needs fixing.

Coding. We have an awesome developer who is quickly building an awesome site. But we have an almost infinite appetite for tech. Projects to be undertaken include: building iPhone, iPad, and Android apps for the show; turning our guest database into a Crunchbase-style wiki that is integrated on the backend with our CRM for managing guest booking and interactions; and many tiny little things, like reverse-engineering the radio clock that our late founding producer, Aaron Swartz, built for the previous incarnation of the show so that we can change the baked-in segment times without his help.

Backlog metadata: Research, writing, design, data entry. The show ran for 14 episodes in 2012. We need to go back through those old shows and find and then load info (photos, bios, links) about the episodes, our guests, and their organizations into our database. Each episode needs a curiousity-inducing title, a great image, and a compelling writeup.

Video editing, possibly including still photos or animation. The more ambitious project related to our backlog: take those old shows and use them to experiment with different ways of converting radio into interesting sharable YouTube chunks.

Copy for website. We need beautifully written, in-the-voice-of-the-show copy for all the static internal pages that a website like ours should have. Also, you should make a list of such pages.

Copy editing. We will churn out a lot of copy. There's nothing better than someone just a gchat away who can make herself available for quickly reading stuff for typos, grammar, and clarity.

Syndication. Getting a show on the radio in cities across the country and around the world: it takes shoe leather. You can help research potential stations that should pick us up (progressive talk radio stations, progressive-minded public radio stations, community radio, student radio, low-power FM, and just about anything that wants great content--we don't mind airing from 2-3am on spanish-language country stations!), and then work the phones and charm the socks off of the relevant decision-makers until they absolutely insist on carrying The Flaming Sword of Justice.

Recruiting. We're hiring! We need help posting the job descriptions everywhere useful.

So, lots of ways to help. But wait! There's more!

Studio space scouting. Someone out there has a perfect space for the show that they'd be delighted to loan us for free, or cheaply, for four to six months as we get rolling and discover what our long-term needs and budget will look like. The space is 500-1000 square feet, quiet (no trains rumbling overhead!), has an area large enough for a radio studio (host, two guests, audio engineer, mics, table, computers, mixer) that can be made not acoustically horrible, and it's convenient to major subway lines so guests will come in person. Anything else is a bonus. We'll have 4-7 people there every day plus guests. Thinking up people who could help, calling them, getting advice about other people... it's a hunt. But the space is out there somewhere. And if you're in an organization with some rooms sitting empty, you'll love having us around--our guests will be the coolest people you've ever met.

Researching potential guests. We're looking for people with amazing stories about fighting to change the world. We particularly like stories where the fights are successful. Or where they're going on right now, and the audience can help win. But the main thing is, generally speaking we're not looking for experts, pundits, talking heads--we're looking for doers, and especially for doers who are also good storytellers. We'll put together a guest/story submission form that anyone can use.

Online publicity. Every episode will have a natural audience of people who would be fascinated by it if they only heard about it. So each episode will need a different strategy to spread the word. What blogs cover the issue or people involved? What reporters never knew this part of what happened, and would be thrilled to hear it and then tweet about it, or even write about it? Is this perfect for Reddit? First, we need a checklist of questions to ask about each episode; then we should try spreading around some old episodes; then we'll need help pushing out our new ones.

Sweet. Again, that's [email protected].

[flamingswordofjustice]

Announcing: the Flaming Sword of Justice 2.0!

I think activists are rock stars. I think true stories about battles for a better world are more thrilling than action movies. And I think email isn't the only scalable way to inspire people to action. So I'm very excited to announce my new gig: _The Flaming Sword of Justice, with Ben Wikler_, powered by MoveOn.org, will soon be daily from 3-4pm on We Act Radio, online, and everywhere we can syndicate. We're hiring, we've got big plans, and we need your help. It's a 21st-century movement-building radio show. Every day, we'll bring you stories of people fighting for progress on all the issues we care about. And we'll tell our listeners how to get involved. You almost certainly know some great guests for us; you might be one yourself. We'll do all we can to help our guests get their stories out--and win their campaigns. And we'll stir in some comedy to keep it lively. We'll use the lessons of online organizing and social media (especially UpWorthy and MoveOn's Share Machine) to build the audience and to help the audience take action. Here's how you can listen, help, or join our team. - [**Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes**](http://bit.ly/swordcast), listen live on [We Act Radio 1480 AM](http://www.weactradio.com) in Washington DC, or stream live via [TuneIn Radio](http://tunein.com/radio/We-Act-Radio-1480-s22091/) - **Join** our [email list](http://www.flamingswordofjustice.com), and follow (and share!) us on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/flamingswordofjustice) and [Twitter](https://www.twitter.com/fsjradio) - **Help us hire** a [social media producer](http://flamingswordofjustice.wufoo.com/forms/social-media-producer/), an [audio engineer/board-op](http://flamingswordofjustice.wufoo.com/forms/audio-engineerboard-op/) (refer the person we hire, and we'll buy you a radio-equipped iPod Nano!), and awesome [interns](http://flamingswordofjustice.wufoo.com/forms/interns-the-gleaming-daggers-of-progress/). - Help us find **space for a studio!** Ideally a 3-500 square foot room, in subway-convenient Brooklyn or lower Manhattan, sub-$1200/month, and quiet. (Tips? Email my producer Shelly Darden at [email protected].) - **Pitch us guests!** Email [email protected] with ideas and people. We'll air a preview episode soon that tells the backstory of the show--a story that touches The Onion; Al Franken; Aaron Swartz (our founding producer); Avaaz.org, Change.org, and MoveOn.org; and *The Princess Bride*. And we'll go daily by sometime in March. To stay informed, again, please do subscribe. Thanks to the many people reading this who played a role in getting it off the ground. And thanks, in advance, for tuning in, coming on the air, and spreading the word. This is going to be a ton ton ton of fun. Warmly, Ben Wikler