SOCIALIST Outlook is more than just a newspaper. It also has a growing presence on the World Wide Web. The newspaper itself has a developing site, and now supporters in West Yorkshire have launched their own local site.
West Yorkshire’s site provides an introduction to the programme and coverage of Socialist Outlook. It includes links to make it easy for readers to go to the national site and to those of the Fourth International. It also promotes policies, events and activities "of local activists and campaigners with whom we sympathise or agree". So far, this coverage includes material about the Leeds Independent Labour Network and an unauthorised "noticeboard" for the UNISON branch at Leeds Metropolitan University, fighting the censorship of their noticeboards at work.
Socialist Outlook’s main site includes articles from the latest issue as well as an archive of previous issues. It also carries details of events, and other documents of interest to campaigners. It has special promotional articles about trade union struggles, and links to the pages of these, as well as links to the web sites of other campaigning groups.
Items from the most recent issue go up soon after publication.
There is also a page of links to sites of the Fourth International and its organisations as well as the magazine International Viewpoint .
These developments give an opportunity to promote our ideas to people who might not come into contact with supporters in trade union meetings or at other local events. The sites are also a resource for supporters and sympathisers to promote our activities and support our efforts to argue for socialist ideas.
Web sites and emails will not replace all the ways we fought for revolutionary socialism in the past. However as young people come to take these means of communication for granted, and more and more workers have access to the web through work, their unions, in libraries or at home, they are likely to become ever more important.
The Socialist Outlook web site can be found at:
http://www.labournet.org.uk/so/
The West Yorkshire supporters site is at http://www.outlook.legend.org.uk/