The BC election had three big stories going on, and each one involves a three-letter acronym. The mainstream media only belatedly realized two were stories, and have yet to twig to the third.
Acronym One: STV
It was only really during the last week of the campaign that the media began devoting a significant volume of ink and pixels to the referendum on electoral reform. With little public discussion or debate around the issue, voters offered a vague mandate for some kind of change… but the arguing over what kind will go on for a long time.
Acronym Two: NDP
The resurgence of the NDP caught most commentators completely by surprise. Many had taken the profoundly-flawed Strategic Counsel poll as gospel, and were ready for a Liberal blow-out. Instead, the NDP came within a few very narrow races of actually challenging the Liberals for power… and leader Carole James emerged as the stand-out star of the campaign.
Full disclosure: I worked on the campaign, and my lawn sported a Mel Lehan sign.
Acronym Three: RSS
Early in the campaign, The Tyee’s election blog broke maybe the biggest investigative work of the campaign: the municipal donation scandal. It cost the Liberals a few precious days to shake it off.
With other sites like Terminal City’s election blog, which opened its pages to public contributions, the online community had a real impact this time around — an impact that spread to the mainstream media. Look for campaigns to work a lot harder to court and spin the blogispheriverse next time out.
Update: The Seattle PI gives The Tyee kudos as well.
You are such an obvious professional. Very well and tastefully done.
I am just the opposite. My grasp of the language is dubious and I don’t know how to spell all that well.
Minor flaws I know. I just discovered the Bloggo venue a couple weeks ago and think I’m in heaven.
Two thoughts to ask your opinion on.
What are the priorities that we Canadian rank and file must demand of Government?
First, Whistle-Blower law with teeth.
Allan Cutler blew the whistle about false contracts he did not want to sign in Guite’s office over ten years ago. See recap, Nat. Post, April 28,05, P-A16
Second, individual Ministry and department accounting and audit system, as opposed to the sloppy general system now in use.
During his CBCTV Grovel speech,
Paul Martin promised to have this safeguard audit system enacted.
Most people missed this, but you will find it in the CBC transcript.
Martin is a pro about pilfering our National wealth. He knows what it takes to minimize losses.
Holding the Liberals to these two actions is a worthwhile priority,
don’t you think?
If you know of any more effective measures than these to protect Canadian revenues, I will certainly be all ears.
Now back to perusing more of your writing.
73s TonyGuitar BendGovernment.blogspot.com
Re: political parties paying more attention to the blogosphere. While I wish this would happen, somehow I don’t think it will. The current Liberal administration believes, rightly or wrongly, that if you aren’t the major media you aren’t worth their time. And I don’t believe that attitude will change until the dinosaurs at the top do.
Never happen.
Blogs aren’t worth sifting through, for the most part, and the only time they actually make an impact is when the mainstream media actually notices.
Forget getting the politicos to read blogs – try enticing some of the lazy-ass “reporters” into reading what actual concerns are, and they will get the storys mentioned in some opinion piece somewhere:
“Some in the ‘blogoshpere’ are worried that…”
Only then could an issue get enough steam to become a story.
To me, the question is what do parties and campaigns want to use syndication and weblogs for? Working (and feeding information to) the blogs of supporters to gove them an online, all-day every-day sense of community is an obvious avenue to pursue, but I wonder if the number of BC political weblogs was large enough this year to justify the sort of effort that some American campaigns pulled off (very well) in 2004. There are a lot of BC-based weblogs, but a lot of them were focussed on the federal scene — but then again, an online outreach by a camapign could _really_ shift their focus.
At least the NDP had a feed, as you demonstrated and I subscribed to, although the NDP news feed was not as complete as the stuff cluttering my work inbox. (I’d find a full press release feed pretty useful.) AFAIK, the only Liberal site that even offered a blog or press release feed was Virginia Greene’s. Without exception, the Liberals seemed to use the same channels this year as they did four years ago, and the NDP only expanded only slightly. Even the Greens, who seem to be the early adopters (they’ve been playing with blogs, wikis, etc for a while) didn’t seem to have a coherent strategy.
For me, the most “useful” blogs often aren’t the political blogs, but the “observational” ones who make note of the interesting stuff they come across and share it with the Web — these are the people who can be like the occasional eyes and ears in places where I’m not. That’s where aggregating like crazy pays off.
(As an example, it was a blog posting on the Kits View giving Gordo an advertorial blowjob that led to me turning that into a story several weeks ago. That’s where the real potential lies — not in poli-blogs devoted to cheering for one side. I’m more likely to take note of a posting by someone who doesn’t post obsessively about politics over someone who’s grinding their axe all day.)
A few quick replies:
Tony – Thanks for the kind words and 73s back atcha. I’ll have to look into individual ministry accounting/auditing; it’s not an area I’m very familiar with.
Sean and Thursday – Points taken, but I suspect a lot will change over the next four years. (For one thing, will blogging be recognizable as a descendant of the activity we know and love today? Discuss.) The American experience suggests that a few blogs will emerge as opinion leaders — both partisan and non-aligned — and parties will have a certain motivation to reach out to them. (And it’s not like personal/political blogs haven’t already made an appearance in BC, even if it was in a pretty marginal story: the Gordon Campbell “Punisher” shirt.)
Ian cuts to the heart of it, though, which is that we’re still kind of groping around looking for the “there” there. “Who the hell cares what you think?” a j-school prof once asked me. What we think is a lot less important than the actual information we can impart.
But while my j-school prof meant his question rhetorically, it doesn’t mean there isn’t an answer. I’m not convinced the “real potential” lies only in non-aligned reportage and aggregation. Raising the odd interesting idea that the offline media have missed remains one of the blogospheriverse’s strengths, even in its partisan quadant, at least for my purposes. And partisans are motivated to do the online digging that can unearth a whole range of surprising facts about their opponents.
(By the way, I accidentally neglected to give Ian a big nod for the Kits View story. It was a valuable lesson in what too often drives local news (sic) coverage (sic), and one of the media’s — mainstream and otherwise — better moments in the campaign.)