We are in the third week of an eight-week campaign to win 2,600 new and long-term readers of the socialist press. Overall the drive remains on target. But the challenge now is to turn around the fact that, after being on schedule for the first two weeks, almost half the local areas are now behind.

Campaigners sent in the following reports this week: “We sold nine subscriptions, including a one-year renewal at this year’s Baltimore Book Fair,” wrote Janice Lynn from Washington. “We also sold 50 Pathfinder titles and 39 copies of the Militant.”

“Our biggest success was in getting out sales to garment and meatpacking plants where supporters of the Militant work,” Jacquie Henderson reported from Houston. “We also sold 25 copies of the Militant at the Alcoa mine/smelter/power plant outside of Houston. All these workers were interested in our front-page coverage” of the miners’ strike in Kazakhstan.

Henderson noted that a number of the new subscribers in the Houston area are students. “One new subscriber is a high school student, brought to the Militant Labor Forum last Friday by his schoolmate who is a renewing subscriber,” she added.

Joe Young, a meat packer in Toronto, wrote that he was part of a team that went to Alberta, Canada. “We sold nine subscriptions in Brooks, including seven to meat packers at the big Tyson beef plant there. Three purchased long-term renewals. We also sold six subscriptions at the University of Calgary. Several subscribers took advantage of the special offers on books, buying three copies of Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, three of The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning, and two of the issue of New International magazine with the article ‘Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun.'"

Dean Hazlewood from Los Angeles reported about a worker who Militant supporters met at a demonstration in National City, California, against the rightist anti-immigrant Minutemen. “She looked at the Militant article and liked what she saw. She got an introductory subscription and donated $15 to the Militant Fund. She explained that she had come to the march straight from her union meeting and agreed with the way the Militant champions both legalization for immigrants and building the unions. ‘Keep up the good work,’ she told us.”

Click here to see the Militant sales goals chart