Check out these clips from the YearlyKos panel, Building the Progressive Youth Movement. Moderator was Mike Connery of The Future Majority, with panelists Shauna Thomas of Young People For, Adam Conner with Rep. Louise Slaughter’s (D-N.Y.) Online Communications Department, Matt Singer, CEO of Forward Montana, and Alexis McGill with Citizen Change.
Election Geek made some interesting points about the use of blogs by presidential campaigns and asks if presidential campaign blogs have become a form of glorified public relations.
At the very start of this campaign I really railed against the idea of hiring external bloggers. I get the idea. Speechwriters could write for the candidate blogs just as they write for the stump but I understand we are Web 2.0 and that wouldn’t be good enough. We want something personal! So instead of reading a speechwriter veiled as a candidate we are treated to the writing of interns, guest posters & full-time bloggers who try to tell us the candidates story through their story, which is immensely uninteresting and distancing and just sounds like rampant cheerleading.
Judge for yourself:
Obama | Clinton | Edwards | Dodd | Richardson | Biden | Kucinich | Gravel
To caveat, however, I think this point needs to be made: If you take into account the totality of web operations, I think several campaigns are doing some very interesting things, particularly the Dodd campaign.
(Disclaimer: Matt Browner-Hamlin, a campaign blogger for Dodd, is a former co-author of The Right’s Field.)
(Hat tip: Mike Connery, The Future Majority)
The New York Times blog The Caucus and political blogger Mike McIntire got an earful in the comments section of a recent post reporting that someone using an Obama for America computer errantly edited a Wikipedia entry.
Somewhere at Elon University’s School of Journalism, Michael Skube is cursing those damn, dirty, editor-less bloggers, and their irrational demands that the media, you know, does its job.