Note to The St. Louis American: Brenda Talent is not Hispanic. Her mom is Japanese.
I know, I know: White people all look alike. But still.
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In Tony Messenger, Missouri bloggers have someone in an editorial room who reads our collective work daily and follows up on our tips. Those tips — from right-wing and left-wing blogs alike — end up as straight news stories and editorials in the print edition, to eventually be read by tens of thousands more people than our online sites attract.
If we care about influencing opinion, isn’t that really the big picture here?
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The venerable Charlie Barnes is hosting an event for Presidential contender Rudy Giuliani in Ladue on Friday, June 8.
Barnes most recently served as St. Louis District Office Director for U.S. Sen. Kit Bond.
This invitation will be distributed later today.
Giuliani exceeded expectations with his second place finish in a straw poll held at the St. Louis County Lincoln Day dinner on March 10. The largely conservative crowd gave the most votes to Sen. Sam Brownback — the night’s keynote speaker — with Giuliani outdoing Mitt Romney.
Fred Thompson has also received attention of late from Missouri conservatives.
Romney visited Missouri last month.
Unlike Romney’s filing, Giuliani’s latest federal campaign finance report shows no Missouri expenditures for finance consulting or other paid operations.
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There’s been a proverbial baby boom of blogs born during this legislative session. Some offer value, others … well, not so much.
But the ones that are good are pretty good indeed, and I hope they stick around. To them, I’ll offer a few brief pieces of advice.
1.) Build your own traffic. No matter how you slice it, there are only a couple thousand people in Missouri who follow politics very closely every day. If your site is good enough, these consumers of information will find you and keep coming back. Blogrolls and such things are some of the most overrated “tools” in all of blogdom — since January 1, less than 1% of all visitors to my site came from another Missouri blog. In other words, if every other blog in the state shut down, just about every person who came to my site today would still come back tomorrow. Building your own following means that when those other sites fall by the wayside, you won’t be affected. It also means that when other bloggers leave you off their “favorite links” or “sites I like” lists, you will be considerably less likely to give a shit.
2.) Respect the intelligence of your audience. Longtime visitors remember that in the old days, I would sometimes link to the same news article or opinion piece for days in a row to make a point — in retrospect, doing so was overkill. Resist the urge to beat your audience over the head when a little tap on the noggin will do.
3.) Have fun. At least one site seems to get this. Good for them. Besides, is there anything more annoying than a blogger that takes himself too seriously? No offense to those people who are paid to run oppo sites, but the rest of us do this for fun, so excuse us if we have a good laugh at the expense of a few Stiffly Stiffersons now and then.
Of the dozen or so new sites hatched this spring, most all will have disappeared by this point next year. But the ones that make it a full year will probably be very good, and will likely offer something of value to all of us during the fall of 2008.
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