After all the pre-campaign excitement, this is turning out not to be the digital or Internet election. But blogging is still doing well amid all the debate hype.
Yesterday, on The Daily Politics on BBC2, I spoke about whether we were having an internet election or a TV election. As I tweeted before I went on air, I’m quite clear that it’s the latter. We also touched the uses of technology in door-to-door campaigning including innovations like the #labourdoorstep hashtag.
Watch it:
If there had been more time I would have said three things in defence of blogging in this election:
1) Blog traffic is up dramatically: over the last month our traffic has increased by 45 per cent and I’d be surprised if the same wasn’t true for many others (especially, I suspect, UK Polling Report). People are clearly using blogs – and the Internet in general – to find information on parties, policies, and candidates.
2) The blogs are becoming an important part of the leaders’ debate experience The progressive liveblog across Left Foot Forward, Labour List, Liberal Conspiracy, and New Statesman (and similar platforms on Lib Dem Voice and Guido Fawkes) provide a place for people to share their thoughts instantaneously. Meanwhile, 35,000 people used twitter and thousands more used facebook during the debates. But caution is needed here since this makes up under 1 per cent of the 9.9 million people who watched the debate.
3) The blogs are also critical for the post-debate analysis. On Friday and Saturday, we ran a series of pieces examining Cameron’s claims on China, Bulgarian cancer stats, and poking fun at his love of an anecdote. Other blogs and fact check websites did similar pieces of analysis. All this helped provide material for the established newspapers who also examined these claims.
15 Responses to “Not the Internet election after all”
Nick Jones
Not the Internet election after all | Left Foot Forward http://bit.ly/d4YGii
Cok Tri
Not the Internet election after all | Left Foot Forward: After all the pre-campaign excitement, this is turning ou… http://bit.ly/9h3WLs
Sean Cliff
Not the Internet election after all | Left Foot Forward http://bit.ly/d2i5iG
Kevin Dunsford
Not the Internet election after all | Left Foot Forward: After all the pre-campaign excitement, this is turning ou… http://bit.ly/cnIxJv
David Jones
I think it’s becoming an echo chamber that distracts from policies, investigative journalism and issues of substance.
Cash-strapped newsrooms (because everyone’s reading the internet for free) are jumping on internet trends/content as something that’s easy and cheap to report.
So the news becomes more and more about what people are saying on the internet in reaction to what little news the media can still afford to report, which is now mostly about what people are saying on the internet…