By Whitney Cheshire
One of my favorite subjects is the political blogosphere. Could we really be coming of age in
Call them blogs, call them on-line newspapers, call them anything you want, but collectively they can be described as increasingly powerful. Take, for example, the Bill Richardson Debate Performance Saga. Every public appearance now seems to be coupled with intense online scrutiny and embarrassing report card-like grading systems.
This week’s CNN-YouTube debate didn’t even throw
How were his hands? How was his weight? How comfortable did he look? You didn’t need to watch the debate for answers. You could just hop online and see what the bloggers had to say.
I’m mentioning this now because it’s a perfect example of a growing-and-never-slowing exodus of American readers from mainstream newspapers to the Internet for political coverage. Americans, in increasing numbers, don’t want to read about politics in black and white anymore. They don’t want to wait for their local morning paper. They want more than just one source.
Of course, most trend trackers will tell you that more and more people prefer the online medium to newspapers because it’s quicker to read quicker to access breaking news. They say it’s physically less cumbersome and that you’re not limited to geographical boundaries and distribution routes.
All true. But as we saw in
ABQ e-mail-gate started with bloggers
Did you catch
The damaging e-mail had wings and appeared to make it to Kingdom Come and back faster than that coke can he notoriously tossed from a speeding car not too long ago. (Yes, of course, that’s a bad joke.)
If you didn’t see the e-mail, you can catch the coverage on The Eye, twice, and Mario Burgos’s blog, again and again. It was a topic of discussion on KNME-TV’s The Line and a two-hour, rip-them-apart banter session on the Jim Villanucci radio show last week.
But surprisingly, there was no coverage about the errant email in either the Albuquerque Journal or the Albuquerque Tribune. There was one quick piece written in the Journal that presented Payne’s defense, but it never mentioned the lengthy and detailed e-mail that raised so many questions.
And because that e-mail wasn’t mentioned – and, some say, investigated – by the Journal, the blog world went a little crazy.
Why does it matter?
More than 300,000 people read the Journal and Tribune every week. They boast that they have the biggest slice of the market for advertising, reaching more people in
Until almost now, the Journal has been untouchable. Because if you were inclined to criticize their coverage, the best you could hope for were a couple of lines buried in the “letters” page with everyone else. And that was only if they chose to print your criticism in the first place.
There was no other option. But things are changing.
Only a few short years ago, I can remember the Quarterbacks, all of us sitting in front of our newspapers in the morning, drinking our non-Starbucks coffee and complaining to other Quarterbacks about what did, or did not, make the cut for coverage in the paper.
And then we’d go to work.
But now, enter the land of the political blogs, or online newspapers, or whatever you call them. Even though these internet sites don’t yet reach the same number of people as the Journal, they are growing. For example, Heath Haussamen’s news site (yes, that’s where you are right now) continues to grow and is now getting more than 10,000 unique visitors per month and over 6,500 hits per week.
According to a recent study by the Pew Foundation, the number of Americans who got political news online each day grew from 11 million in 2002 to a whopping 26 million in 2006. That’s an incredible leap, by any standard.
Print reporters actually indulged bloggers’ criticism
So, what’s the
Check out the Duke City Fix. They posted their take on The Skipper and Captain Payne last week that ended with the following questions:
“There is a real story here and strong evidence of real abuses of power and violations of the City Charter. Are City employees engaging in campaign activity at Chavez’s direction? Or Payne’s? Where is the print media on this?”
Did their probing fall on deaf ears?
Absolutely not. Two Journal reporters, including Dan McKay, who wrote the original article, posted their own comments on the blog about why the e-mail was not covered. How incredible is that – for a mainstream media reporter to indulge the criticism of some hacked-off bloggers?
Or maybe there’s another way to look at it. Perhaps the Journal reporters are glad to have a forum where they can discuss their coverage – a send-and-receive flow of information instead of just a send. I would imagine that the good citizens at the Duke City Fix are happy to provide the forum, especially since the Journal Web site does not.
I was told months ago that readership at the Duke City Fix rivaled the daily circulation of the Albuquerque Tribune. If that’s true, it would explain why their coverage and commentary is taken seriously.
So back to the point about participation: At the time of this writing, there were 44 comments posted in the Duke City Fix thread and 45 comments on The Eye on Albuquerque.
Online blogs and political news sites are becoming so much more powerful in the political arena not because we can read them so much faster, but because, for the first time, the average Jane and everyday Joe can participate. Not only can people air their grievances with their elected officials, but they can also fire shots at the media if they don’t like how they choose to cover, or not cover, certain stories. And they can do it in front of a huge audience just by hitting the enter key.
We’ve been watching the media accountability phenomena on the national scene for years. But with the recent flap over honeybees and ship captains in the
This is new for us, folks.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that our homegrown