Milwaukee talk radio host Charlie Sykes posted the following two questions to the Wisconsin blogosphere. Below each question are my personal thoughts.
Query One: Why no interest in Doyle's handling of school choice in the blogosphere?
Answer: Personally it hasn't been a lack of interest. Until a couple of months ago, my blogging was much more national in nature. This site was started in June, and much of my blogging from June through November dealt with the election, terrorism, and the war, which are three areas I'm very comfortable with. Wisconsin politics, sadly, were not as high up on my radar screen. As I try to bring myself very quickly up to speed on local topics, I've chosen to bypass topics that I didn't think I had given enough thought to yet. This was one of them, unfortunately.
Query Two: What's the next step in promoting the new -- very active -- WI Blogosphere? I'm open to suggestion. The MSM will ignore this development as long as they can, but that shouldn't deter us.
Answer: This is a difficult question for me because, at the urging of a few others, I set up the frame work of the Badger Blog Alliance (everyone else's participation made it into something unique), and I feel like I should have a big vision for it that I can share with everyone. Instead my policy has been to pretty much leave it alone and let the other great Wisconsin bloggers, who so enthusiastically came on board, help set the tone for the site. To be honest, I was caught off guard by how quickly it all came together a couple of weeks ago. It is a very small part of the vibrance of the Wisconsin blogosphere, but it is a place where we can join our voices together and make a little bit more noise than we can individually (hopefully).
So, having said all of that, I do have a couple thoughts on promoting the Wisconsin blogosphere. The first is the easiest for me to work on. The Badger Blog Alliance needs to be refined more by me so that it really becomes a portal for anyone who wants research and opinion on Wisconsin news and politics. The links need to be more robust and defined, and I need to do some footwork to get the site more exposure than it already has. If we can get the site acting like a portal, then it becomes a central clearing house which will make it easier for people to access all of our sites, making the Wisconsin blogosphere that much more difficult to ignore. Eventually that will mean moving the site off of Blogger and making its graphics much more crisp and professional, but that's another story for another time.
Secondly, we need to reach people who normally may not visit blogs. The only way to do that is through traditional media, and most outlets would just as soon pretend we don't exist. NBC 15 out of Madison had a story about blogs on their 10 o'clock news on Sunday night, and they managed to make the Wisconsin blogosphere look like the driest, most boring piece of fluff you can imagine. They also went out of their way not to bring up any of the vibrant Wisconsin blogs (read conservative) that people really would want to read. Perhaps it would be a nice segment for your show if once a week or once a month you had a small panel with a couple of Wisconsin's biggest and best bloggers. Choose a topic which those couple of bloggers could prepare for ahead of time, and maybe do a 20 minute Wisconsin blog panel. I'm not going to be so presumptuous as to recommend any more than that, because radio is not my career and there may be very good reasons that this isn't a good idea, but I think that there are several very eloquent bloggers who would do a great job for your show, and they would do a great job in making the Wisconsin blogosphere even more legitimate in the eyes of those who would ignore us. I'm thankful for everything you've done for us, so just take this one as a brainstorm type thought.
These are just a couple of thoughts. In addition to these, we all need to make sure we keep the momentum we've had the past couple of weeks rolling. If we don't, we become easy for the mainstream media to ignore, and our collective and individual influence wanes.
1 comment:
It would also help if you had featured counterpoint to a Wisconsin newspaper. Most of us who are news junkies like to know about such papers. Most of the captive audience of newspapers want (desperately) to know there are other sane people who disagree with the Left of Lenin editors and journos who collect at newspapers like flies attracted to bad meat.
Not only would it give you a topic of the day for each of you to input and refine, but it might give you influence with the newspaper and let them know they are being monitored. The fact that they haven't been in 40 years is why they are so irresponsible with the truth now.
Just an opinion.
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