SD Political Blogs -- Be a Yokel, Read Local!

just don't plagiarize...

The Yankton Press and Dakotan gives online politics big coverage this weekend with not one but two big articles on the role of blogs and other Web word warfare in Yankton's current recall ruckus and politics in general.

First, Nathan Johnson offers some interesting details on the mysterious, anonymous, disorganized (should've used a free blog), and occasionally incomprehensible NewYankton.info. The anti-recall website refused to communicate with Johnson's paper for the article, ostensibly out of disagreement with the Press & Dakotan's management. Their beef? Evidently NewYankton.info has used text from the P&D "without permission or proper attribution." P&D publisher Gary Wood has e-mailed the NewYankton.info folks, asking for a conversation to arrange an agreement for acceptable use of the paper's copyrighted material. Rebuffed by these anonymous (and now plagiarizing? check the rules, kids) bloggers, Wood has called for the NewYankton.info folks to remove all P&D copyrighted material from their site. The NewYankton.info folks have added Wood to their list of persecutors, calling his e-mails "bullying tactics" [Nathan Johnson, "Yankton's Web War," Yankton Press & Dakotan, 2007.12.08 -- there, see, NewYankton.info? attribution isn't that hard... but let's see if Mr. Wood calls...].

Mike Keitges complements Johnson's report with a general report on blogging in South Dakota politics. Mr. Epp gets some free press (every blogger's favorite dessert), opining astutely about the increased influence online grassroots work can have at the local level. He notes that the Yankton recall marks the second major manifestation of blog power in South Dakota politics, following the efforts of Lauck, Sibson, et al. in the 2004 Daschle-Thune Senate race. Epp also notes that online anonymity can produce "coarser and meaner" discourse (evidence of which we see throughout the South Dakota blogosphere daily).

The best Epp quote of the article relates to the power of local bloggers like himself and recall organizer Ben Hanten:

"Local bloggers like Ben or myself can have as much or more impact than national bloggers because we are close to the issues and the people we write about" [Todd Epp, in Mike Keitges, "Blogs Becoming a Player in Local Politics," Yankton Press & Dakotan, 2007.12.08].

Hear, hear! It is exactly that closeness to the issues that keeps me from spending much time reading Badlands Blue, the paid blog of the South Dakota Democratic Party. Badlands Blue is intended to be a community blog where any interested South Dakotans can post their thoughts. However, it is mostly the commentary of Lowell Feld, a national political operative hired by my party to generate content. Feld is right on most of what he writes, but how well can he truly understand the thoughts of South Dakotans and the impact of the policies Herseth, Johnson, and Thune vote on when he's writing from his comfy chair in Virginia?

Consider Feld's coverage of the fundraising effort to rebuild the Pretty Bird Woman House women's shelter on the Standing Rock reservation. He offers two links to the shelter supporters' websites (but wait a minute -- the ChipIn page Feld links is out of date, linking to a May fundraising push but not the current one -- keep those donations coming!), but then gives three links to DailyKos. That linkage suggests Feld spends more time reading the national blogorazzi than noting the South Dakota coverage the Pretty Bird Woman House has already gotten (see, for instance, South Dakota Magazine Dec 5 and Prairie Roots Nov 30). Local voices, local issues -- that's where it's at! If Badlands Blue is to have a real impact on South Dakota politics, it will need more local voices... either that, or Feld will have to move to South Dakota for 2008 and drop in for coffee.

Back to Keitges's article: he also talks to USD political science department chair Bill Richardson* about the influence of blogs in local politics. Professor Richardson has been keeping it local in class, incorporating discussion of the local blogopshere into his lectures and salting that with local perspective from students from Yankton. Prof. Richardson says the Yankton Web war shows "how the intertwined issues of leadership, democracy and citizenship are often most prominently and passionately on display in local government rather than in its state or national counterparts" [Keitges].

Indeed, local politics can be more passionately fought and more fun than any larger scale politics. Consider, though, that South Dakota as a state is still small enough (add us all up, we're still smaller than over a dozen other cities around the country) that you can think of the entire state as one local community in a way that wouldn't apply to larger, more diverse states like New York, California, or even Minnesota.

Richardson also sees the Internet causing a significant power shift "to the politically astute and technically proficient citizenry" [Keitges]. The politically astute have always found ways to get their message across. The difference now is that the technology is cheaper, faster, and more accessible. The press is no longer a big expensive machine with lead parts whose outputs take at least a day or two to reach potentially interested readers. Now the press is a laptop, the distribution network is the instant Internet, and any honyocker with a few free minutes before breakfast can crank out his message and take a fair swipe at the powers that be.

I'm reading a book right now -- Aaron Barlow's The Rise of the Blogosphere -- which argues, among other things, that Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Alexander Hamilton were the fathers not only of our country, but of blogging. Remember The Federalist Papers? Really a blog, says Barlow.

Our Founding Fathers would be proud of us... of Ben Hanten... and maybe even of NewYankton.info.
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*Madville Times Political Weird Science Bonus: Is there some strange cosmic attraction between the name "Bill Richardson" and comedy? Every time Professor Richardson comes on KDLT to expound his political wisdom, my wife and I can't resist saying, "Hey, there's John Cleese!"










And then there's Governor Bill Richardson from New Mexico and his comic doppelganger, Horatio Sanz: