Denis Horgan of the Hartford Courant has turned his newspaper column into a blog. The blog format is very well suited to online news sites, unlike, say, the use of wiki, which failed so spectacularly at the L.A. Times's site.
Denis has done the right thing so far in actually responding to questions and comments readers pose. Not only is this good form, it gives the public a chance to actually interact with someone they've been reading for years.
The same is true of candidate blogs, I believe. If Dan Malloy and John DeStefano posted and responded on their blogs on, say, a weekly basis, regular voters might start taking more of an interest in them. There is certainly a lot of interest here when candidates come for Q&As.
Blogs might start being useful in non-campaign years, too. Elected officials certainly answer a lot of mail and email: why not add in a bit of time to post and respond in something like a blog format? It's one thing to answer private mail, but interacting with people on the public web could help elected officials reach and talk to thousands they never could before.
The example not to follow for this is Kevin Sullivan's poor little abortive blog, which started off well enough but hasn't been updated in almost two weeks. Sullivan never actually responded to the questions people posted on the site, many of which were genuine, and the conversation first degenerated into a grouchy snarkfest and then petered out entirely. Sullivan promised interactivity and then didn't deliver, which frustrated people. I can't blame them.
It's telling, though, that there are so many comments on the site. People are interested. They want to talk to the Lieutenant Governor, even if he apparently doesn't want to talk to them.
Websites in general and blogs specifically are still evolving as a medium. Kudos to Denis Horgan for being willing to interact with the reading public. Here's hoping more will follow his example.
7 comments:
Ghenghis, you have emerged as a prescient and capable leader on the Connecticut blogoscene.
Kudos to you and thanks for your effort and the quality of your work!
Thanks, CT05. I'm looking forward to seeing your site and the other district-specific sites take off next year.
Our goal at the DeStefano Blog has been for the Mayor to post at least weekly, and respond to comments. Unfortunately, the schedule just hasn’t worked out well for that recently. A lot of that is probably my fault and I need to be more proactive on that.
Nonetheless, we are hoping to get that going again. We also thought the online Q&A’s that have gone on here are very important and we have been trying to expand on that and schedule a larger dialog on our blog. Currently, we are looking to have one next Wednesday from 5 to 6, assuming no scheduling changes.
I hope a lot of people join us for that.
In terms of turning e-campaigning into e-democracy, that is a topic very close to my heart and was one of the first things I asked the Mayor about before joining his campaign. He told me he was committed to using blogs to improve communications within the State House. Whether or not that means I will be any more successful in getting him to blog on a weekly basis as Governor than I have been getting him to blog on a weekly basis as a candidate remains to be seen, but I look forward to trying.
In terms of a Turn CT Blue blog, or something like that, I’m all for it. I set up Democracy for CT as a site where progressive Democrats, particularly those coming out of the Dean movement and Democracy for America, could post information and have their own blog. Any progressive Democrat that wants to blog there is welcome. We could also set up a good Connecticut Politics blog aggregator, if people would all support RSS.
I also would like to help bloggers do more as a group in Connecticut. From the campaign perspective, I would like to schedule regular conference calls with bloggers and the Mayor. In addition, I would love to see a CT Bloggers Convention.
Anyone want to help make this happen? Get in touch with me
aldon@destefanoforct.com
Scheduling is probably the biggest barrier to this sort of interactivity, but I think it'll be worthwhile for the candidates and elected officials who do it regularly.
I've added a more accessible RSS feed (through FeedBurner) at the bottom of this page. If anyone is having trouble getting the feed from this site, let me know.
A CT bloggers' conference? Not a bad idea at all! It would be nice to meet everybody.
Add my support for holding a CT Bloggers conference at some point in the near future. I'd love to be a part of it.
Another thought I had was having a weekly podcast where we can all reflect on the previous week's political news. I was thinking the format can be similar to that of Twit. It could be quite successful. The Gizmo Project (a skype competitor) can make this very easy to do. Any interest out there?
I also like Aldon's idea of creating a Connecticut aggregator for Connecticut blogs. I posted myself up on Blogpac.org but perhaps it would be beneficial to have a Connecticut oriented site as well.
Nate,
Good question. It's really up to the individual how much he/she wants to respond to. It may be useful to set up ground rules beforehand, like, say "[Candidate/Public Official] will only respond to questions relating to general public discourse on this thread," and so on. But that can easily get unwieldy, too.
A forum could be moderated, of course, with offensive/stupid/annoying content deleted. That opens an entirely new can of worms, though, as people complain about being deleted "for no good reason!"
The Denis Horgan blog actually screens comments to make sure they aren't outrageously offensive before they are posted. Others do this, too. It's a little annoying, but it might be worthwhile. It also, unfortunately, takes a lot of time out of someone's day to monitor.
Dan,
I certainly hope that the Lt. Governor doesn't allow what could potentially be a very valuable tool slip away. I encourage him to be as responsive as possible where this is concerned.
However, I haven't been able to find any of his responses on the blog itself. Did he respond to people privately?
Post a Comment