Irish Political News

Back in early December I posted a run-down of the list of weekly columns on the Wardman Wire, using the excuse that the site “has been a bit of a building site recently with a lot of changes”. I’m pleased to say that the move from a personal political blog to a site with a wider team of writers is nearly complete - so there may be a bit more stability round here for the next few months (at least in terms of who is writing). This is an extra Blog Platform column to map out where we are and where we may be going. What Happens each Week I’m doing a rundown by day this time. There’s more to say, but I’ll keep this post as short as I can manage. Now that the rate of change on the blog is slowing down (at least in terms of new and guest writers), I’ll see if I can be more reliable at making sure that things appear on the right day. Our practice is - with one or two exceptions - to publish the column each day at 11:00am, to give time for the article to hit the RSS feed in time for the lunch break. Then nothing else appears until perhaps 4pm. As ever, the best way not to miss anything is to subscribe to our RSS feed. Nearly Every day “The Daily Roundup” is currently a roundup of 10 or a dozen newspaper stories designed to provide “blog fodder” for our readers. It focuses on interesting and occasionally unusual stories. On good days it is published around 1am; on not quite so good days with breakfast or a little later. As you can see from the podcast player in the sidebar, we experimented with a daily podcast - I hope to take that forward, but I’m thinking about a practical approach. The “Morning Funny” (which needs a better name) is a cartoon or joke which appears at the start of the day - usually at around 9:00am. There are agreements in place with 5 or 6 different cartoonists to reproduce their work, and I sometimes re-recycle a joke from the Adam Smith Institute Jokester; make that “used to re-recycle” - he has retired. Monday “The Day Job” is about what bloggers do when they are not blogging. I have only done one of these, and intend to increase the frequency. Tuesday “Politics Decoded” is Garbos weekly political comment column - running for 6 months now. Garbo publishes his “bon mots” before lunch on a Tuesday with the reliability of Mr Gordon asking Mr Cameron questions at PMQs instead of answering them. (more…)

My piece “Columnists and Reporters are the new bloggers”" featured in the Britblog Review this week, and has had some good feedback. I’ve reproduced some snippets, and a long comment from Ruthie Zaftig that deserves front-page exposure. From the Chameleon She periodically engages in such gratuitous outbursts, so much so that I wonder if it is not simply another exercise in self-promotion on her partafter all, I expect she receives a great deal more attention when she spews hatred over her blogging rivals than when she tackles other subjects. Yep. From Ruthie Zaftig I know a lot of journalists who have personal blogs unrelated to their jobs as well. Its somewhat cathartic to be able to inject personal opinion, or write about your cat, or your kid, or whatever you like, rather than a 500-word piece on a big house fire that killed two kids. That gets old fast. Id like to think that bloggers fact-check as rigorously as journalists do, but: A. Journalists make mistakes, and B. I see a lot (a LOT) of bloggers falling back on preconceived notions, the direction of the wind, third-person accounts or secondary sources to determine their position, rather than you know primary sources. That frightens me a bit. Here in the U.S. theres been this big blogging movement about Barack Obama, one of the democratic candidates for president, being a Muslim extremist. Its patently false, and even the most rudimentary amount of research makes that clear, but a lot of American bloggers ran with it anyway. I dont say it too often, but I think we have some things to learn from the staider end of the US Newspaper Industry in this respect. Im inclined to agree with you, and although the U.S. media have their own problems, Im alarmed by the direction media seem to be heading in the UK. The mainstream media in the UK dont seem to operate under even the pretense of objectivity (with a few notable exceptions). I could be wrong about this, because I do live in the U.S. and dont read British newspapers regularly. I hope I am. But its a trend I see in the U.S. too. Civic journalism is gaining support over traditional, staid notions of objectivity. By the way, what is a cat flap, and what on earth does she have against blogs? Did a blog bite her? Did a blog steal her car? Did a blog poison her soup? Yep. (more…)