Blog wars

This last weekend's events in south Florida went very well, and hopefully I will have some pictures and more information to post in the next couple days... I did want to post this Adam Smith story from yesterday's St. Petersburg Times titled "Florida's new political blog wars". Note which Blogs it mentions and which Blogs it leaves out.... It chooses the right leaning Sayfie Review over The Fort Report but it does mention Mike's 'not affiliated , but still a YD' Blog Florida News.....

At Florida Politics last week they debated whether Florida Democrats should focus on improving their showing in big counties or rural counties. Florida News noted that Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Gallagher back in 1994 aired a campaign ad implying Jeb Bush helped Fidel Castro by backing a free-trade agreement.
Sayfie Review gave Katherine Harris' entry into the U.S. Senate race far less play than it did Gallagher's and Charlie Crist's long-expected announcements for governor. Meanwhile, Blogwood bashed Harris as "a staunch opponent of medical choice" and knocked incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson for voting for a bankruptcy reform bill opposed by many consumer groups.
The political blogosphere is taking off in Florida, but no one really knows yet whether it's a blip in how political journalism and communication work in Florida or the start of a dramatic change.
New Internet sites devoted mainly to state, local or regional Florida politics seem to be popping up every week. Most of the new ones are left-leaning. Some encourage online dialogue. Some are solo political rants about the news of the moment. Some, like Sayfie Review and the Fort Report, mostly aggregate daily articles from across the state. Others critique the reports and reporters themselves. Most are free to anyone with Internet access, but at least one newcomer, Florida Insider, charges a $149 annual subscription fee for its essays, analyses and tips on political doings in Florida.
"You're seeing a revolution out there. It is a revolution as momentous as the printing press," Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, told reporters and academics from the Southeast gathered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last week.
The broader national story of the influence of the Internet on journalism and politics has been well-told: Bloggers basically pushed CBS News anchor Dan Rather into early retirement after leading the charge in questioning the authenticity of documents concerning President Bush's military service. Bloggers and the Internet helped catapult Howard Dean, who started out as the obscure governor of Vermont, into a well-funded frontrunner for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination.
"In the old days, the agenda-setting and the issue-framing was a closed shop," said Justin Sayfie, a Fort Lauderdale lobbyist and top Republican fundraiser whose Sayfie Review reaches about 5,000 readers every day. "You had the big media organizations, and their reporters were basically controlling the issue-framing and agenda-setting. Now that power to frame issues and set agendas is democratized."
Sayfie's political bent is more subtle than many of the other bloggers, usually shown by how prominently he highlights stories, rather than through overt opinion. Seeing the growth in Democratic-leaning, opinion-heavy blogs, though, Sayfie plans to start a more opinionated conservative blog later this summer.
Some national blogs - dailykos.com, for instance, or andrewsullivan.com - are so well read by political junkies and insiders that the bloggers have become virtual celebrities themselves in the mainstream media world. Former U.S. Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., a prospective presidential candidate again in 2008, recently paid homage to the new medium and invited some of the most prominent bloggers to dinner at his Georgetown house.
But as the blogging world grows increasingly crowded for national politics, getting noticed in the blogosphere becomes tougher. That may be where state politics come in. "If you want to be prominent, the national stage is getting crowded, said Mathew Gross, Dean's former Internet director, who participated in the roundtable organized by UNC's Program on Southern Politics, Media & Public Life. "On the state level, it's still wide open."
Some of those on the front lines of Florida's blogging community say they're mainly looking for an outlet. If they gain some prominence in the process, so be it.
"There are a lot of people frustrated by the political process, and blogging is a very empowering activity," said Derrick Newton, a Democratic consultant in Miami who recently started contributing political analyses to the Florida Politics blog.
Readership remains small, but often includes opinion-makers and influential people - be they political activists or elected officials. Subscribers to the Sayfie Review daily newsletter, for instance, range from Gov. Jeb Bush to people in the White House to almost every Florida political reporter.
"There's really no money in it, so it's a labor of love. I like to share my opinion," said Norwood Orrick, 40, who owns a computer shop in Tampa and says a few hundred people check out his Blogwood site daily. "Hopefully, we can persuade the persuaders. You're aware of the regional blogs, so perhaps our coverage will help influence your coverage."
Bloggers and blog readers are sure to grow along with broadband Internet access. So too are the sticky issues that accompany them. The Federal Election Commission is now grappling with whether bloggers should be regulated, and some experts see the blogs as the next big loophole for bypassing campaign finance restrictions.
Most bloggers don't consider themselves journalists, and don't feel bound by any presumption that they must be fair or balanced. But that doesn't mean they're immune from libel laws. One particularly biting anonymous Florida political blog, the Grapefruit, disappeared a couple years ago soon after it posted an account of a state senator frolicking with lobbyists in a hot tub at a St. Petersburg hotel.
Frontiers are fraught with unforeseen problems and issues, and online politics is no different. But I don't have time to think about those right now; I have to check whether this column got decent play on the Safyie Review.