"Blogging Back"

A comment from this week's Molesworth and Featherston

Blogging back

We’re fascinated to watch Labour’s fightback in the blogosphere, with the launch of a partyaligned blog, The Standard. Labour has trailed among bloggers, leaving commentary on the left to the likes of more left No Right Turn and the Greens' Frog Blog. Commentator Russell Brown’s Public Address is the granddaddy of New Zealand blogs, and sympathetic to Labour, but National has been reaping the gains of an enormous readership for David Farrar’s Kiwiblog - its daily readership rivals a modest daily newspaper. Just as important as their enormous readership, though, the blogs are influencing editorial content. Where they once drew their cues from mainly from talkback, reporters are now also daily watching the main blogs as straws in the wind. It helps give editorial weighting to the salience of issues. Labour scored a hit with a brutal (and unfairly edited) video of John Key at the Porirua weekend market. National have owned this space for a while. Blogs aren’t new any more, but their political sophistication, reach and influence is growing.

I am sure you can find Labour's blog if you want to. I had a look and my only reaction is I am tired of blogs run by people who won't put their name to them.

It is interesting also that Labour belatedly gets a blog going as their Electoral Finance Bill clamps down on free speech but exempts non-commercial blogs from the status of "election advertisements".