Would-be leaders find new sphere of influence Unpredictable online journals
gaining credibility

OTTAWA— The Liberal leadership race, like no other political contest before it, is being waged in the "blogosphere" — the rollicking, unpredictable world of online diarists and self-made political pundits.

Would-be Liberal leaders are seeking interviews with bloggers; there are blog endorsements, campaign blogs and bloggers who are doing double duty as leadership organizers.

The development signals several important political shifts: the rising credibility of the online dialogues, the parties' increasing use of the Internet, as well as the need for this Liberal race to be waged in creative new ways because of limited money and a large field of candidates.

The bloggers haven't replaced the mainstream media — or MSM as it's called on the blogs — but they are gaining a currency in the political market that they haven't had to date.

And it's not just a Canadian phenomenon. Last month, U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton has hired a prominent liberal blogger, Peter Daou, author of the Daou Report on Salon.com, to help build bridges to the online community in her campaign to seek the Democratic presidential nomination.

For the past several weeks, as the July 4 deadline loomed for recruiting new members, the 11 would-be Liberal leaders started turning up with remarkable frequency in the blogosphere.

Some of the biggest traffic was at Calgary Grit (http://calgarygrit.blogspot.com). This blog, one of the more prominent and respected in Liberal cyberspace, was among the first to get a bona fide interview — with leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff.

Bart Ramson, the man who runs Calgary Grit, acknowledged on his blog that he was surprised when Ignatieff sought him out and offered an interview. He didn't even own a tape recorder for that first interview, though he does now, since he's conducted several more and has plans for more in the summer.

Ramson says it just "makes sense" for the candidates to take advantage of the blogosphere.

Some candidates, such as former public health minister Carolyn Bennett, are old hands at using the Internet. Bennett has been doing live, online chats for years with constituents and citizens and even did a session with the Calgary Grit a couple of months ago, which attracted a fair share of conservative hecklers. "Some came to see what accessible looked like," Bennett says.

Alicia Johnston, who does media relations for the Ignatieff campaign, said their team decided from the outset to cultivate the bloggers. "In some ways, we treat them like the media, but they're not the same," she said. Bloggers, she says are more partisan than mainstream journalists, and there's plenty of competition to cultivate their endorsements.

'Kennedy's name was all over the blogs at a time when he didn't even show up in the "top 20 candidates" lists newspapers were running'

Bart Ramson, who runs Calgary Grit blog

Brad Davis, also from the Ignatieff campaign, says bloggers are a good way to measure instant reaction as well as a useful test of politicians' ability to network.

"The sizable readership of the blogosphere is an example of the growing use of the Internet as a social medium, where individuals engage in dialogue and build relationships. Given that political success is quite often tied to the ability of a candidate, campaign or party to engage and build relationships, anyone that ignores the new Internet reality does so at their own peril," he says.

How do they decide which blogs to favour with interviews? It's just a matter of surfing and seeing which ones feature the most traffic. Blogs often include something called "blogrolls," lists of other recommended sites. So by casting through the blogrolls, you can start to see who crops up more than others.

The "Cerberus" blog (http://canadiancerberus.blogspot.com) is actually keeping track of the bloggers' endorsements of candidates. At its last update two weeks ago, Ignatieff was in the lead with 23 endorsements, followed closely by Stéphane Dion and Gerard Kennedy, with 20 each.

Ramson isn't sure this new influence of blogs will spread to the next election campaign. He has his doubts, in fact. But he does believe that blogs are well suited to leadership races, especially ones with large fields of candidates, where there's no clear frontrunner.

"This convention won't be decided on the first ballot, so it's going to come down to the 5,000 delegates in Montreal" in December, Ramson says. "The type of people who go to these conventions as delegates are the die-hard political geeks; the same type of people who read political blogs daily. A Liberal leadership candidate can likely reach a larger audience of delegates through a Liberal blog than a local (or even national) newspaper interview."

Ramson also believes the newness of the medium is proving attractive to candidates. "There's also a sense that blogs are somewhat hip and ahead of the game. ... In this race, Kennedy's name was all over the blogs at a time when he didn't even show up in the `top 20 candidates' lists newspapers were running ... A candidate who projects a strong presence in the blogosphere might start looking like the `it' candidate to Liberals and media who read the blogs."

Jason Cherniak, 25, an articling law student in Toronto, oversees "Liblogs" (http://liblogs.freethought.ca) — a daily posting from a wide sampling of Liberal blogs. He also is co-chair of Dion's "blog campaign." Yes, that's an official title.

"Liberal bloggers can spread information and provide ideas that central campaigns tend to miss," Cherniak says. He believes that in the next election, "Liblogs will be at least as valuable as Conservative bloggers were during the last one."

Cherniak is impressed with how seriously the candidates are treating the blogosphere.

This explosion of interest in the blogs could also be rooted in that old truism of making a virtue out of a necessity. The Liberals have set a $3 million spending limit for candidates, but it's not likely many of them will even raise that much, so virtual conversations may be more efficient than constant travel in the next several months.

Moreover, traditional news media are physically unable to cover all candidates, all the time. Merely putting a comment from all 11 candidates in one news story, in print or in broadcast form, consumes a lot of the shrinking media space for political news.

The blogosphere knows no such limits.

Toronto Star

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The overall tone of the article wasn’t too critical of the blogosphere, which for the traditional media was somewhat surprising. I am not too keen on the title of the article--it has the ring of a condescending tone and it does leak out from time to time in the article. But I'll overlook it because titles of articles do act as hooks to entice readers to read more. One has to read complete articles before making up one's mind what the writer had to say.

There really isn’t a competition—the blogsphere needs the information from the traditional media who often take a lofty position about their reporting.

The blogosphere will give feedback to the traditional media about the quality of their reporting—they won’t mince words about their opinions about it and they will point out every time when they are being written about with airs of haughtiness. Blogs do have influence and it is growing. Each will have to adapt to each other. This writer would do well to be more circumspect and perhaps analyize why she is disdainful of the blogosphere. Does she feel threatened by the presence of bloggers in some way? Her ability to report has been minimally affected in the article, but why is there at all? "Yes, that's an official title? The blogosphere knows no such limits." ? Those two remarks need to be clarified, preferably reworded; they carry possible offense to bloggers. Ethical bloggers do have self-impossed limits just like traditional reporters and they have new titles because English changes as new words are adopted into common usage.