Monday, December 11, 2006

Bloggers Should Blog

If there's one thing that I regret about the past election cycle -- and given how everything went, there might just be only one thing -- it's that I wasn't able to fully reconcile my work with the campaign and my writing here on this blog. As it got closer to election day, I was doing more and more interesting things, but writing about them less and less. Even now, with the election a month in the past, it's been hard for me to get back in the swing of things.

The title of this post I stole from one written by kid oakland back in October. He argued that "the best thing any blogger can do as an election approaches is to do what they do best year round." That stuck with me during the time between the primary and the general election. I started this blog because I was vaguely aware that there were a lot of political events happening that were not being covered by the media and that you would never know what had happened unless you were there. I decided that part of my mission would be to go to them and write about it. For the past few months, I've been going to things, but not writing about it, or about much of anything else. All last year, I was in a position to make politics more accessible to people, yet I did not find the time or the energy to do so.

There are only so many hours in a day, and perhaps if I had the ability to stop time, I would have been able to blog more during the campaign. I made the decision to spend my free time on the campaign rather than on the Internet. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure I made the right choice, but it got me thinking about how to blog as part of a campaign. What would be interesting for people to read? Perhaps I should have focused less on documenting whatever atrocities the state GOP had committed that day and written more about what being a town coordinator was like. People might be interested in what we did and how we did it, but I always felt that I shouldn't be giving the strategy away. It's silly, really, given that everyone knew that Deval Patrick's strategy was to get as many people involved as possible and get them to convince their friends and neighbors to do likewise. At the same time, before becoming involved in this campaign, I never really thought about what a campaign's field organization did. Maybe if I had read someone's campaign diary, it wouldn't have been so scary to get involved in the first place.

Does anyone have any examples of really good campaign blogging from this cycle or others? Not simply using a blog to get the message out, but something that goes through what it's actually like to work on a campaign.