Ottawa

BUMPED AND UPDATED: A gentle suggestion to our nation’s fine political bloggers

UPDATE: This is the posting where I invited Inkless readers and bloggers across the country to post their accounts of local all-candidates meetings. Several have — both in the comments section below, and on their own blogs. I wanted to bump this post up, first to thank and acknowledge everyone who’s shared their impressions of local debates, and second to encourage anybody who hasn’t done so to post their own accounts in the comments. Or if you just want to complain that we’re profiteering off your free labour, feel free to do that too. — pw

Kady’s liveblog of last night’s Ottawa Centre all-candidates’ meeting (with kibbitzing from citizen voter Wells in the comment section) is the most-read item on Blog Central today. It helps that at least two candidates, the Conservative and the guy from the Pot Party, were picturesque in different ways. But I think there’s simply a lot of interest — in this riding, but also outside it — in what actually happens on the ground during a campaign.

Perhaps other bloggers would like to take this hint.

Two weeks to go in this campaign. It’d be interesting if bloggers all over the country went out to all-candidates’ campaigns and reported to their readers — and through links in the comments below, to ours — what they see. I’m sure many of you already have done something like this; feel free to post links before. (Our comment-moderating software is skittish about links, so your comment might get sent to moderation when you post it. I’ll take care to ride herd on the moderation queue and approve your post if that happens.)

Obviously a lot of Canada’s political blogs have a partisan slant, and their authors will feel free to indulge those preferences when they describe what they see. It would be great, however, if some of what gets written isn’t just cheerleading for your preferred candidate.

Nor do you need to have your own blog if you want to play. Simply post a synopsis of your local all-candidates’ meeting in the comment board below. Please keep it shorter than, say, 300 words, but give us a sense of how it went.

I have a hunch that political blogs would be more useful if fewer of them consisted exclusively of Here’s What I Think About This Morning’s Headlines and if more consisted, sometimes, of Here’s What I Saw When Politics Happened Near Me. Here’s a chance to test that theory.

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