Cross-posted locally.
So, this blogging thing … I’ve been struggling with it lately. What purpose does it serve?
For example, should we engage in all-out message war with the likes of the Koch brothers? (Those guys make no bones about it — they are at war with us. But does that, should that, mean we are at war with them?) If so, I have trouble accepting that. I thought the goal of all the electoral wars I fought in was peace.
Should we referee every comment made by every politician?
There are many different definitions of the purpose (“More and better Democrats”) and many different approaches. Some state blogs are virtually captive arms of their state parties. Some blogs are barely read at all. Some are vibrant, but conveniently ignored by elected officials, because the participants will claw at each other, looking inward and not outward. It’s ironic, I think, that politicians have learned to fear amateur camera operators in their face, but can pretty much disregard the writing of thousands of activists, voluntarily chronicling the actions of said officials on issues they care about.
I have a proposal. I don’t expect it to be acted on immediately, but I want to put it out there.
What if a number of blogs, large and small, converged on one city at a time?
For example: Brockton. Brockton has over 90,000 people, and a lot of good things but a number of problems. The Enterprise is now a Gatehouse property and a shadow of its former self. The Globe and Herald pay little attention to Brockton. Can “citizen journalists” step in, at least for a while?
Massive collaboration would be the idea. Education blogger? Great, join us for Brockton Week and write about the system; use it as a lab for the programs you care about. Open meeting law advocate? Cover the planning board. Casino proponent/opponent? Surely Brockton’s name has come up.
I studied journalism, at Keene State College in New Hampshire, in the mid-1980s. Our textbooks were full of dire warnings about the rise of corporate journalism, the then-creeping ideological bias (“objective journalism is a trend that is already ending,” I read), and the shift away from newspapers. I was skeptical that any of this would happen, but all of it has, and far more severely than anyone predicted. Net result, a news gap. Suburban towns get covered well enough, but not mid-size cities.
And after Brockton, other cities. New Bedford. Lowell. Manchester. Worcester. Pittsfield.
Am I projecting? Yes, massively. If I could do it myself, I would. But one premise of blogging, I think, is that the crowd can amplify voices. We can stand up for Brockton. We can stand up for the things we really care about in politics.
Let’s think about it. Thanks for reading.
and care little about you. Much like I think George Soros cares little about me.
… if Soros is in a union.
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p>http://www.npr.org/2011/02/25/…
…but for whatever reason he’s been set up as the bogeyman moneybags of the left, like the Kochs are for the right.
An obstacle I see — one that manifests itself in other areas — is that the demographics of those cities make it unlikely that such a blogger would step up to the plate.
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p>When you have a mid-sized city with a majority population that is lower-middle-class and below, in my experience this population does not take a broad view of things, probably because they are spending most of their energy on their own needs. When you’re worrying about whether you’re going to make the rent, you don’t really have time to opine on municipal issues, and you sure don’t have time to run around the city looking for stories to write about.
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p>This is why the majority of online voices from such places in low-cost-of-entry forums (such as newspaper forums) are small and predominately conservative in nature — because they represent the few upper-middle-class residents in those places. (Or, more often, they are suburban voices venting their anger on the urban residents).
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p>Case in point: in the Masslive.com Springfield forum today — a city that is about 60% non-white — most of the posts are about how bad affirmative action is, and how liberals have ruined this country by giving out Section 8 and welfare to all those undeserving people (read: Blacks and Hispanics). And virtually no one argues with them.
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p>This lack of energy can be found other places in the city. Civic organizations are typically made up of older white residents. Even with the introduction of ward seats for city government — in the first election with this new system we had one person take office by simply collecting enough signatures to get on the ballot — he ran unopposed for school committee, representing 25% of the city’s population.
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p>There is no energy in the city because there is a shortage of people who have the time and energy to put in.
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p>I will agree with you that a blog lowers the cost of entry for journalism. However, without a way to be compensated, the people you’re going to attract are those looking to push a particular agenda. In Springfield, there is one local blogger, a hard-core Republican who frames every story as “this is what happens when Democrats give welfare to people”. We had a great “urban blogger”, she was a stay-at-home mother who was very educated and willingly lived in a marginal neighborhood. She even spent time going to press conferences and getting to know the inner workings of the city. But she moved away 3 years ago when her husband got a new job and no one filled her shoes.
…of an article I was alerted to just today. The premise is that the right knows which organizations actually connect public policy to real world consequences for this demographic, which is precisely why they attack them.
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p>Esteemed BMGer Lynne does a great job with Left in Lowell, but I suspect it suffers from the same demographic deficiency you describe.
…of tooting my own horn, there is some of this going on in Worcester. Your account leaves out the “just showing for a meeting” crowd which does exist and is wired.
In Worcester, I write on education (I’m now on the School Committee, but I blogged first, and the connection is known). Between Nicole, Mike, and the regular commenters, there’s some coverage of some things that don’t make the local paper. That’s without getting into posts on Facebook, the various Twitter feeds, and Indymedia, which covers a bit more.
Some, only, certainly, but I do think that the population for this might well be out there.
It’s called Patch Journalism. It even offers some potential for bloggers to be paid minimal amounts. We have a few Patch Papers springing up.
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p>But I’m just an angry old white Republican who hates city dwellers instead of caring about people wanting to get ideas out to be discussed. Why I am telling you about this, I have no idea.
you’re not angry.
This could be bipartisan. Not non-partisan, but bipartisan.
The Hyannis Patch has people commenting on the recent Fresh Holes shooting, who aren’t going to talk to a ‘real’ newspaper. I went to the main page, clicked Mass., and saw that Jamaica Plain and some other neighborhoods have their own Patch – but no Brockton.
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p>Entry is easy, and it’s a way for locals and bloggers to interact and share info. You know, the thing about the single stick, and the BUNCH of sticks…
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p>(Lynne – Lowell doesn’t have on either)
Some of this is in reply to comments on Blue Hampshire and will seem out of left field here.
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p>Full disclosure: I would happily entertain a job offer from Patch, the Concord Monitor, or what’s left of the Brockton Enterprise. But this isn’t about my career or lack thereof, and it isn’t about competing with or replacing them.
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p>Mainly, this stems from my frustration, dutifully documented here and elsewhere, with the DISCONNECT between an army of concerned citizens so committed that they’re willing to blog about making better politicians and the actual political actions taken by the people we help. Politicians scoff (figuratively), in the immortal words of Jon Stewart, “Oh, activists. Those are just the people that care the most.”
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p>This is about the gathering information as fuel for action. So you’re invited to a house party for Senate Candidate X, and you’ve just spent some time in Brockton, and you ask a direct question about what you saw. After your candidate wins, in six months you ask the question again.
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p>It’s not about messaging, and it’s not about serious investigative journalism. In some ways it’s about reconnecting ourselves to the stuff that brought us to politics.
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p>Thanks again.
It’s also not about “punishing” said officials. It’s about helping them deliver where it counts. Any punishment they get will be cheerfully doled out by independent voters.
In my view, the most fundamental shortcoming in “citizen journalism” is the as-yet unsolved problem of how to validate the facts/truth/honesty of whatever is reported. Adding more noise to an arena in which the noise is already deafening is not, in my view, going to help much.
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p>It seems to me that some sort of emergent network of fact-checkers (and fact-checkers of the fact-checkers) is an approach that is most likely to result in the rapid availability of accurate information.
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p>My issue with the Koch brothers, Fox news, and the right-wing blogosphere is their commitment to putting “message” over truth. I don’t much care whether they are at “war” with me or not — if the material they publish is true, then I want to know about it. The unfolding saga in Wisconsin exemplifies this problem.
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p>Let me offer a specific example. The truth is that Wisconsin taxpayers actually pay nothing — that’s right, zero as in nada — for the pension plans that cover Wisconsin public workers. Even Forbes — a bastion of conservative economic opinion — agrees.
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p>I note that it isn’t just the Koch brothers who have so badly blown the reporting on this fundamental fact. The sad truth is that most American’s don’t know this, because it isn’t being reported. It isn’t being reported by blogs (except for those who picked up the above), it isn’t being reported by MSNBC, by Fox, by CNN, or by the hard-copy outlets. It isn’t being reported because, as David Cay Johnston observes in the first link (emphasis mine):
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p>The public — and therefore the electorate — is being “informed” with material that is just plain wrong. The electorate is, consequently, driving political decisions and economic policies that are just plain wrong.
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p>I’m far more concerned about this than I am about how loud any particular voice is.
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p>The rapid availability of accurate information about events they have created to suit their agenda, like videos about ACORN de-funding and the troubles in Wisconsin.
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p>This is noise we can never shut down. Sometimes I feel like we help them by trying. (I know you disagree, I know most people disagree — but truth squading isn’t working for me any more, as a citizen.)
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p>It’s not about the Koch brothers per se, or any of my examples per se, but about, pardon the expression, expanding our own definition of reality. We need to pay more attention to the basics.
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In your first paragraph, you mention ACORN de-funding and “the troubles in Wisconsin.” Both are examples where the “information” that was published was somewhere between outright lies (ACORN) and wildly distorted (Wisconsin) and incomplete (as I noted above).
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p>I do not want to live in a culture that attempts to “shut down” material that somebody considers “noise”. I don’t know about you, but I am most explicitly not “trying” to shut down noise.
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p>You say that “truth squading isn’t working for me any more, as a citizen”, in a thread you started yourself about “citizen journalism.” What is citizen journalism about, if not “truth squading”?
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p>You really lose me when you speak of “expanding our own definition of reality.” Just what is THAT? In particular, what is that in the absence of “truth squading”?
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p>Finally, you implore us to “pay more attention to the basics”. Is there anything more basic than accurately reporting the truth?
2. It gets widespread attention.
3. A few of us howl.
4. Congress de-funds ACORN, with plenty of support from people we supported who should have known better. Goodbye for good, extinct, forever.
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p>1a. An a-hole does something else …
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p>In short, I want to refocus the agenda. Never mind the latest right-wing issue of the day (Remember the bow that was too low?), but focus on issues on the ground. We argue about, for example, education. OK, what’s working in a real place? What’s not working?
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p>The truth is out there. I am tired of the nation’s agenda being hijacked.
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Ensuring that information is accurate does not mean that we must let the nation’s agenda be hijacked.
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p>Yes, we must maintain a focus on our agenda. In my view, accurate information must be a basic component of that.
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p>These are not two opposites that we must choose between. Instead, we can and must do both.
I’m inclined to agree with your assertion that we can and must do both, but I’m beginning to question that premise. If we take the ACORN example, defending it in light of the phony “revelations” was impossible. It would have been better to broadly educate the public and press (and, apparently, Democrats in Congress) about what ACORN did.
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p>Now they’re going after Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood is stronger and more mainstream, but still, they have to fight lies.
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p>They’re going after unions, and I don’t think it’s a secret that unions aren’t as strong as they once were.
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p>So, depending how “we” is defined, I don’t want a reactive agenda. The media, by definition, are reactive. Can we as activists be proactive and reactive? I really don’t know the answer, but I do know that I’d prefer to be proactive about this country’s problems.
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Frankly, blogs are just an opinion medium. They are used by a few people that generally hash similar themes to each other and agree with the bashing they are doing. I don’t go near my local blogs…they are vindictive, negative bastions of self propaganda. In my opinion, and I say this knowing that I have stated my opinion on certain officials and policy, any public official who is on a blog looking for comments or discussion about himself or herself is an egomaniac. Who in there right mind who come on to, say Blue Mass or Red Mass, and look at what people are saying about them or their ideas? Good Lord!!!
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p>Based on the discussions I have seen, we are mostly left leaning and are really just looking for a lot of confirmation of our ideas. Great for us but we just all like to see ourselves talk.
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p>Our real work is out in the community talking to people, NOT phony ID names on a blog. Go out and talk to those being effected by policy. It is easy to send out a message, blog post, email thread etc and just make a blanket statement without a factual basis. A new idea here, or there. You hit send and there…it…goes….. Your damage is done and whether you are right or wrong, whether you have attacked someone or not, its out there. That’s not meaningful dialogue. So while I appreciate the intelligence of a lot of us, its just a way to throw things out there. Even professional blogs…I mean…I don’t see the thrill.
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p>If you post more than 2 paragraphs, you lose me anyway…hot air speeches are enough, I don’t need hot air blog posts…in fact i stopped reading my own post after the first paragragh!!!! LOL
n/t
I struggle to make my diaries and comments brief but still relevant. (Check your own longish comments my friend,)
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p>You make some valid points like
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p>Our real work is out in the community talking to people, NOT phony ID names on a blog. Go out and talk to those being effected by policy.
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p>Add “write about it” or “podcast about it” and then follow up with policymakers about it, and then we’re at what I’m suggesting.
just add organizing and mobilizing into action and you are absolutely perfect.
But my only problem with this, not directed at you, Judy, is … well, these officials we work to elect as our leaders? Shouldn’t they be out front on this stuff? I’m finding myself increasingly annoyed with the endless cycle: elect them, push them to do what we want, defend them when they (inevitably) screw up, be there for their reelection … when do they come in?
WBUR had a small item this morning about some towns — Lowell was one, I recall — where there are not enough grocery stores for the population. So some people are forced to shop outside the town.
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p>Now, obviously most people in these towns have cars, and driving is not a huge burden. But where I live, you can barely function without a car, and I still see some people who appear not to have them — lugging heavy bags of groceries by foot or on the bus.
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p>These people become local oddities of sorts, and their situation is not news in the local paper. But the hardship of a town where this might be much more common (like Broctkon, or Lowell itself) — who covers that?