Brooklyn-based indie press Melville House Publishing wants the people of New York City to read The Mueller Report, and it's pushing a city-wide initiative, "Citizens of New York," to make it happen.
In an effort to promote more widespread reading of the document, which MHP published earlier this year as a mass market paperback, the publisher will send staffers around New York City with a video camera, asking people on the street to read segments of the report for broadcast on social media.
MHP is one of three companies whose edition of the report made bestseller lists, and is the only mass market edition of the report. The company plans to roll out the videos over the next week, and invites others in the book industry—particularly independent booksellers, the publisher said—to rebroadcast the videos via their own social media.
“We called our edition of the report the 'people’s Edition,'" MHP publisher Dennis Johnson said, “because we didn’t put any extra material in it that would give the book a bias." He added: "The Citizens of New York project is about taking that to the next level. More citizens—who, don’t forget, paid for this investigation with their tax dollars—need to simply read the report and not let pundits summarize it for them. That’s our best hope for a more informed citizenry in the run up to the next election.”
