Citizen Journalism

The Politics in Minnesota website is steadily picking up steam, a day at a time. We are adding several new blogs across the spectrum to our blogroll today, and in the next few days we will join the nationwide Hotline Political Network, a loosely affiliated set of independent political reporting operations from California to New Hampshire. Hotline, published by the National Journal, is a well-regarded hub for national political news, drawing upon thousands of media sources.

Our new political blogs for the Minnesota political blog directory:

• Under journalist blogs: HometownSource.com/blogs, the ECM Hometown Source blog, which brings together four blogs written by the staff at HometownSource.com: The Upsider Blog by Patrick Tepoorten, Infinite Learning - Endless Possibilities by Elyse Kaner, The Howzer Connection by Howard Lestrud and Places I Remember by H Burke.
• Under conservative blogs: ChisagoGOP.blogspot.com is holding it down for the GOP in Chisago County, with four regular contributors.
• Under liberal blogs: Minnesota Farmer-Labor Caucus is keeping an eye on State House races and holding DFL pols accountable to progressive values.
• Under liberal blogs: LiberalMediaElite.com, which described itself in a pretty awesome way: "...a foul-mouthed political blog from America’s Heartland. Since we’re from the Midwest—the Heartland, that is—we have considerable moral weight. Because Midwesterners are the simple, yet trustworthy and moral, idiots savant of the American imagination. It’s true. Look it up."
• Under conservative blogs: GopConventionReport.com by Nicole Russell tackles the staffing and bits and pieces of early news about the 2008 Republican National Convention on its way to St. Paul.
• Under liberal blogs: MnImmigrantRights.net is covering immigrants' rights events in Minnesota, mostly event notifications. Runs on the Drupal engine, just like PIM!
• Under conservative blogs: M4GW.com, Minnesotans for Global Warming, an alternative conservative take on climate change, with funny images and material available, by Elmer Beauregard.
• Under conservative blogs: NorthStatesman.ning.com, "Save the USA while it still exists," looking out for globalization trends like the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), the NAFTA Superhighway, the U.S. Rep. Ron Paul presidential campaign, offbeat conservative and tech news. [Also Ning.com is a nifty base service to build a social networking site like NorthStatesman from.]

Those are all the blogs to add that we've got right now. If you have already sent a blog notification into staff@politicsinminnesota.com and it's not here, it must have gotten lost in the shuffle, so send us another note!

If you have a blog we already listed, we'd really appreciate it if you returned the favor and add PoliticsInMinnesota.com to your own blogroll, and perhaps even a handy link to the well-rounded daily material of the PIM Morning Report, a helpful link for readers of any political orientation!

Update 10/19: We just posted two more back issues of the PIM Weekly Report:

• Politics in Minnesota: The Weekly Report - Vol. 3, Issue 13 - 8/10/07: In This Issue: The Race to Replace Ramstad; The Rammer is Rich; More Big Changes At The Star Tribune; A Modest Edina Media Spectacle; Larry Craig: Whose Waterloo?; Bits & Pieces; Lobbyist Watch.
• Politics in Minnesota: The Weekly Report - Vol. 3, Issue 12 - 9/21/07: In this issue: The 3rd: Ramstad Retires; The 1990 Ramstad GOP Endorsement Victory Redux; The 2008 GOP & DFL Endorsing Contests; Who Wins?; MnDOT's Travelin' Gal; Media Machinations; Back in Black: Blogger With PR Machine; Tunheim Acquires New School; Bits & Pieces; More Web Media Is Good Web Media; Stillwater Levy Blog Wars Get Way Too Personal; Lobbyist Watch.

We still have to dig up and post Vol. 3, Issue 11, a task for next week!

Internet marketing guru David Erickson, who owns www.e-strategy.com, has a long and fascinating post on citizen journalism / citizen input about the bridge collapse. Several of David's most compelling conclusions:

Mainstream media still holds citizen journalism at arms length. With the exception of Minnesota Public Radio, almost all of the mainstream media treated citizen journalists as a resource for reporters to tap for their own reports, rather than treating citizens as co-equals who can tell stories themselves.

Citizen Journalists can be surprisingly competent reporters. I was struck by both the volume and the quality of the citizen reports. The eyewitness accounts were compelling with vivid details and more often than not lacked the melodrama to which amateur writing is often suspect. The citizen generated photos and video were equally compelling.

Flavor and Context. The eyewitness blog posts, the on-the-scene photography, and even the handheld and cell phone videos complete with their jerky motion and blurry, overcompressed images, all contribute far better than the mainstream media, to giving you a more accurate sense of being there. The videos, especially because of their amateur look, gave the viewer a powerful sense of the frantic chaos on the ground.