Many of you are also subscribers of The Fulcrum (and if you're not and want to be, join us!) For readers and for those still unfamiliar, this week I want to share some updates on the initiative. 

The Fulcrum is one of the signature projects of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund, a digital news journal dedicated to enhancing discourse and mutual understanding among citizens and healthy democracy practitioners. Our core aims are to earn trust and respect by promoting news about bridging, reform, and civic education, encouraging civil political dialogue, embracing a variety of opinion perspectives, and adhering to factual accuracy in reporting. Over the past year, the Fulcrum has also worked to evolve our methods and amplification to incorporate the principles of Solutions Journalism, which delves into the nuances of divisive issues, seeks trustworthy information, and fosters meaningful discussions across differing viewpoints. We've also recently begun publishing some syndicated columnists that share perspectives from across different political ideologies.

These changes have also led to a 350% increase in users so far in 2024 over last year, but also a strong increase in the number of original articles being picked up on the Tribune news service and published in local newspapers across the country - and the world. Our stories have been picked up nearly 2,500 times so far this year! This evolution is an important part of our vision for leveraging The Fulcrum to be an amplifier for the best stories of the collective efforts of the healthy democracy ecosystem.

We know our Bridge Alliance community has always been supportive of the Fulcrum, and appreciate that support. We hope you’ll continue to support us through the growth of our new YouTube channel, which we’d love to share with you. Click on the YouTube link and subscribe, and you can access our Fulcrum Democracy Forum interview series, music and features, and be ready for what comes next as it continues to develop!

Next week, I'll be sharing another polling and research update - if you have any research from the past couple of months that you think would be beneficial for the community, please send them my way!

Featured Content

• AllSides (Blog) May 1st: Should Students Have Free Speech? When it Comes to Pro-Palestine Protests, The Left and Right Switch Sides
• American Promise (Statement) April 25th: ABA Task Force Submission: A Constitutional Amendment to Address the Corrosive Influence of Money in the American Political System
• American Values Coalition (Blog) April 25th: TikTok: Misinformation Superspreader
• Ballotpedia (Resource) May 2nd: Oklahoma bans ranked-choice voting, joins six other states in prohibition
• Divided We Fall (Article) April 25th: Are Standardized Tests Useful for University Admissions?
• Horizons Project (Newsletter) April 30th: THE VISTA: April 2024
• Independent Voter (News) April 25th: Pew: Half of US Voters Would Replace Trump AND Biden on the Ballot If Given Chance
• Issue One (Article) April 24th: Issue One commends Congress and President Biden for addressing TikTok national security concerns, calls for comprehensive safeguards
• RepresentUs (Blog) April 22nd: Earth Day: How Corruption Affects our Environment and Health
• Veterans for All Voters (Newsletter) April 26th: April 2024 Updates
  

Podcasts

• Ballotpedia (On The Ballot) April 25th: MIT reports a decade's progress in election admin across US
• Common Ground Committee (Let’s Find Common Ground) April 25th: Bipartisan Trust and Common Ground in Congress: Reps Dusty Johnson (R) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D)
• The Democracy Group (The Politics Guys) April 17th: The Uses and Abuses of the Modern University
• The Village Square (Village SquareCast) April 25th: Jonathan Haidt: The Anxious Generation
• R Street Institute (Politics in Question) April 29th: Do white rural Americans pose a threat to democracy?

Citizen Connect Featured Events

• The Growing Democracy Project (May 3rd @ 12:00 pm EDT) Invitation to ProSocial Café – Consciously Developing Democracy
• Resolutionaries (May 6th @ 12:00 pm PDT) Scale Up: Tools for Managing Political Polarization
• Sphere Education Initiative (May 7th @ 12:00 pm EDT) Sea‐​Launched Nuclear Cruise Missile: Necessary or Excessive?
• Unify America (May 7th @ 2:00 pm EDT) Unify Challenge
• The Village Square (May 9th) God Squad: Seeking Higher Ground in the School Wars

Featured Fulcrum Articles

• F. Willis Johnson, April 25th: Protest as a democratic function
• Jonah Goldberg, April 26th: The Republican Party can still do what's rational and right. Here's the proof.
• Kevin Frazier, April 26th: Amending the Constitution is not just possible – it's necessary
• Seth David Radwell, April 30th: The decline of critical thinking
• Staff, May 1st: Law Day – May 1 – is more important than ever