This was a really, really cool event today. I was fortunate enought to be the representative from Blue Mass. Group. Terrific talks from Stirling Newberry and Frederick Clarkson, and a discussion about blog tech with John Garfunkel of Civilities.net.
Do read the liveblog here. It’s like you’re there..
Update: see my further remarks on the day’s events on the comment below.
Please share widely!
that I was not able to attend this event. It just turned into an impossibly busy weekend for me. Kudos, again, to Lynne for doing the lion’s share of organizing. Here’s hoping that there’s another one soon!
David, I did get noisy and semi-audible recordings of Stirling Newberry’s and Fred Clarkson’s talks, both of which were quite excellent. So I can get you those at some point.
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Newberry made a resonant and crisply stated case for the importance of blogging: 1. distillation of complex thoughts into something more readily understood, and 2. the credibility that comes from someone whose values are transparent.
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Fred talked about his personal experience with Progressive Dems of MA and with blogging, especially his (and our) work on Schofield, et al. This included an angry indictment of a mainstream media that doesn’t bother to cover these critical races — the people in charge of spending our tax money, after all — in any meaningful way.
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He’s right. It’s appalling. It shouldn’t be left up to us. But here we are.
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Sco and I also talked to Jarrett Barrios at great length about his Middlesex County DA candidacy. You have to give him credit: he has tons of energy and enthusiasm, and cares and knows about the issues in a kind of all-consuming way.
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Also, Shai Sachs and I caught rides with sco on the way out and back — thanks sco. I can say that their drive-time banter is every bit as interesting and amusing as their writing.
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Citizens of MA: your lefty blogs are in good hands. đŸ™‚
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We’ve got some very cool projects that we’re going to start working on, including a legislative calendar so that we don’t get caught flat-footed when important things come down the pike.
It was good to meet you in person. And Frederick Clarkson, who I’ve corresponded with on occasion since I discovered his blogging about a year ago. And to confirm that yes, Stirling Newberry the blogger is the same Stirling Newberry I remembered from high school (another one from Brookline đŸ™‚
I was at the BlogLeft conference yesterday and it was great. I wasn’t sure what to expect, as I don’t know many bloggers and comment online very infrequently. I was excited, however, to meet some of the folks filling a serious gap in local news coverage.
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I didn’t get a chance to meet Charley, but am ever grateful of the work everyone at BMG does.
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Many thanks to cos for his stellar coverage on the special elections. I try to keep up on the open seats, and google searches (as Fred Clarkson so aptly pointed out yesterday) generally return two types of hits — dead links to a single newspaper article or blog posts. The blog posts are much more reliable.
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What I see, as a former reporter, is a massive vacuum in local coverage and citizen journalists filling that vaccum. I also see a lot of potential in the Massachusetts blogging community. But more on that later.
Hey Doc, sorry I missed you. What do you look like?
hey Charley, I was up front through lunch, with green sweater and glasses. I came in late, and missed most of the candidates, but loved the breakout groups.
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If you’re coming to the DL holiday party Wednesday — with Shai and crew — I’ll be there.