Meet the Bloggers

January 10, 2006 6:18 AM

Meet the Bloggers is a group of Ohio citizen journalists who have been interviewing state political candidates, podcasting the interviews and taking questions from anyone who is interested in the candidate's policies. [more inside]
posted by sciurus (3 comments total)

They were scheduled to interview Rep. Sherrod Brown who is running for a US Senate seat; Brown had one of his staffers cancel [.wav] the meeting because of an alleged altercation that took place between Brown, his wife Connie Schultz [a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist], and one of the Meet the Bloggers interviewers. Adding another twist, the same staffer who cancelled the interview has apparently been leaving anonymous comments on Ohio political blogs covering the Brown campaign. Much more info would be available at BuckeyePolitics, but the site was taken down yesterday.

This strikes me as an interesting case study about the interactions between political campaigns and empowered citizen journalists. This is new territory and it is pretty obvious that the rules of conduct are still pretty nebulous. Are bloggers in your area doing anything like Meet the Bloggers?
posted by sciurus at 6:19 AM on January 10, 2006

Interesting. I've seen some wild *post*-election blogging here in Delaware. For example, a citizen of the small Delaware city of Smyrna created a blog called Stupid and Wrong to protest what looked to him like a stolen Mayoral election. He has kept it going, even after moving out of state!

This election dispute also led to a flame-war on a quasi-blog site maintained by one of the statewide newspapers. This was the source of a free-speech/free-web case in which opponents of the elected Mayor tried to force the local ISP to give-up the identities of anonymous posters who were casting fairly gross aspersions on-line. Those anonymous posters were widely thought to be the Mayor and/or his family. The courts sided with the ISP in defending anonymity.
posted by mmahaffie at 6:55 AM on January 10, 2006

Thanks, sciurus. An excellent use of the web to advance democracy. And mmahaffie, fascinating ruling.
posted by tidecat at 6:58 AM on January 10, 2006