An action occurring alone in the woods (or on a sidewalk) may or may not make a sound, but it definitely won't make much noise in the media... unless you actively do something to get it heard.

Journalists are your audience: make them laugh

Basically we try to make journalists with our projects. If we can make them laugh, they know they can make readers or viewers laugh—and that means they can make a story.

Let’s stop worrying about doing big actions and blasting the word out in various ways like Twitter and Facebook, banking on the theory that the sheer mass of information will trigger media coverage. Instead let’s start putting ourselves in the shoes of journalists as a matter of course.

This is intended to model a "reveal" release, i.e.

Too often activists think they have to get journalists to an event in order to make it a success in the media. Often this is exactly the wrong approach - it’s sometimes better not to have any reporters there at all, but to do your own documentation and then get it to reporters. There are several ways to do this.

There are a lot of things wrong with the mainstream media—very, very wrong—but generally if you do their work for them they will be very happy to pay attention to your activism. Document everything that you can along the way, from the brainstorming to the day of the action and beyond. If your action includes some kind of street theater or any kind of live action human drama, always take care to ensure that someone from your team records it.

In an age of NSA nuisance, security and privacy in activism is a very real concern. As much as you want people to know what you’re doing and cause a rumble, you want it to happen on your rules - not when some two-bit hacker decides to poke around. That said, security culture can be a double-edged sword: in organizations based around community and trust, suspicion is no one’s friend. So here are some Yes Men tips and tools for staying safe - and, more importantly, sane.

The Yes Men do not generally use arrests as a way to grab media attention, but we very much respect it as a tactic. If your goal in getting arrested is to increase press or visibility for your issue, there are various ways to optimize the arrest. Some people have used arrests to significantly change how the mainstream media covers their cause—and some big organizations like Greenpeace have made it part of their daily operations.

Putting together a press conference on behalf of a target (who doesn’t know you’re doing it) can be very simple. You just need to set up a podium with a logo on it in front of a building and speak over a PA system of some sort to a small audience of fake reporters (plus real ones, if you can convince them to show up) and planted passers-by (then real ones who stop to see what’s going on). No forewarning needed: just turn on your sound system, start speaking, and record the whole thing.

There are different reasons you might want to accost people on the street (when we say “to accost,” we mean “to grab the attention of unsuspecting strangers”). The reasoning is for you to think through. As for the ways to accost them...

Stand next to a stunning sign
Why not put up a sign advertising something particularly great or offensively horrible, and stand near it with a brochure? You can represent yourself as the company selling this product if you want, which makes the action more fun.