An Indian, Arun Gupta is the founder Editor of 'Occupied Wall Street Journal' !!!

Arun Gupta, one of the paper’s
 founders  and a senior editor of a free
newspaper called The Indypendent.

 Occupy Wall Street Newspaper Raises $54,000 on Kickstarter

There’s a new newspaper on Wall Street, and it’s targeting a very different demographic than the classic publication. The Occupied Wall Street Journal, a newspaper dedicated to the Occupy Wall Street protests that began on Sept. 17, distributed its first issue on Saturday.

Backers on crowdfunding site Kickstarter have picked up the printing bill for 50,000 copies and have already chipped in enough money for a second issue. The New York Times says that at the time of its first issue, the paper had raised more than its goal of $12,000 using the site. At this point, that number is close to $54,000.

“PLEASE KEEP CONTRIBUTING! We don’t have billions like FOX News nor are we bankrolled by the Koch brothers,” reads an update to the paper’s Kickstarter page. “We only have YOU! You have our tremendous gratitude, but this money will only pay for two issues.”

Resulting pledges have put The Occupied Wall Street Journal in ranks with Kickstarter’s most funded projectsin the writing and publishing category. It’s just $2,000 behind the periodical in the section with the most funding, a website for smart sports writing.

The four-page first issue of the protest’s paper includes profiles of protesters, instructions on how to help the movement, a map of Zuccotti Park (where a group of protesters have been camping out since Sept. 17) and a rundown of the protest’s third week by Arun Gupta, one of the paper’s founders and a senior editor of a free newspaper called The Indypendent.

Arun K. Gupta:A founding editor of The Indypendent, Arun Gupta writes about energy, the economy, the media, U.S. foreign policy, the politics of food and other subjects for The Indypendent, Z Magazine, Left Turn andAlternet. Gupta is a regular commentator on Democracy Now! and GritTV with Laura Flanders. He’s writing a book on the decline of American Empire to be published by Haymarket Books. From 1989 to 1992 he was an international news editor at the Guardian Newsweekly.

Occupy Wall Street Protests Sprout 928 Offshoots On Meetup.com Overnight

Meanwhile, Occupy Wall Street which began with a couple hundred protesters in Manhattan’s financial district Sept. 17, has sprouted “Occupy Seattle,” “Occupy San Francisco” and several other solidarity events in more than 200 cities across the U.S.

The independent events, some simply community discussions, have been loosely tracked with Facebook,Google maps and links lists. Now, group meeting platformMeetup.com is assisting the protesters in their grassroots efforts.

“We were contacted by the good people at Meetup.com, who got in touch because they heard we were in need of some technical assistance and advice,” says a blog post on Occupy Together, a site linked by Occupy Wall Street websites and protest publication The Occupied Wall Street Journal‘s Kickstarter page. “Little did we know we’d go from listing 4-5 locations in one night to receiving hundreds of emails in a day. We were slowing the flow of information because us volunteers weren’t able to keep up.”

Meetup previously worked with activist magazine Adbusters, an early organizer of the protests, on a project called “buy nothing day,” according to Meetup VP of community and strategy Andres Glusman. Adbusters made the introduction between Meetup and Occupy Together, which ultimately decided to use the platform’s free organizing tool, Meetup Everywhere.

Instead of continuing to maintain a list of protests, the site now features a Meetup widget showing 928 Meetups in 906 cities across the world, most added since Oct. 5 — and many with 0 participants.

Organizing on Meetup, a platform designed in many ways for grassroots organizing, has thus far been less common for “Occupy” protesters than organizing on Facebook. In most cases, the Facebook Pages trounce the new Meetup pages as far as attending participants go. The Occupy Wall Street Facebook Page has more than 130,000 Likes. It’s equivalent Meetup page has 23 “occupiers.” Similarly, Occupy San Francisco has 8,672 Likes and just 27 occupiers. A website called Daily Kos plotted the Facebook Pages on a Google Map (shown below) to make them easier to find.

Meetup has a couple of advantages from an organizing standpoint: a centralized landing page and a format focused on clear actions. It makes sense both the free platform and the unofficial organizers of protest information found it a good fit for Occupy Wall Street offshoots.

Scott Heiferman, Meetup’s CEO, has tweeted about his own involvement in the protests and is a backer of theThe Occupied Wall Street Journal‘s Kickstarter page.

Truth be told, both Facebook and Meetup are pretty chaotic as organization platforms. It’s hard to tell who, if anyone, will actually show up to any of the scheduled events. But that, according to Occupy Together, is part of the point.

“The GREAT thing about all of this, is that it’s completely in line with the whole idea of this decentralized movement,” the site says. “Any single person can start an action in their area, and where one stands up there will likely be another to join you.”

Perhaps, but at many of the new zero-participant Meetup locations that have been set up in places such as Jerusalem and Bologna, that one person is still lonely.