FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

I was going to wait until sometime tonight to post this, but since some of the reactions have been based upon the published version mentioned earlier, which places much more emphasis on my personal financial travails than was the case in the full piece, I’m posting it now so it’s understood just what I actually wrote.

Originally asked for around 700 words, that’s what I submitted. In response to feedback, mainly in the realm of asking for more about a couple of points, I submitted a second draft — which, of course, ended up being longer than the intended word count.

What got cut was the bulk of what I had to say on other aspects, leaving behind a piece focused mainly on the financial side. Since I’ve repeatedly stated that the finances were not the main and primary reasons why I quit, I would like people to see the full version of what I wrote.

I was a blogger.

Well, I am still, but not the blogger I was for nearly three years. From December 2002 until September of this year, I was the sole writer, editor, and publisher of Portland Communique, a widely-acclaimed “experiment in amateur journalism and hobbyist reporting” (as my boilerplate went) which focused on Portland politics.

During that time, I partook not only of the standard blogger’s refrain of linking to and commenting upon other news sources, but also spent countless hours at election campaign events, neighborhood meetings, and wonkish sessions on City policy, contributing to the local media scene my own brand of original and opinionated reporting.

It was a full-time endeavor, both my avocation and my vocation, made possible through a combination of advertising revenue (many local political candidates advertised on the site) and reader contributions — although the latter category would include members of my family back in New York, who in essence subsidized what the Portland market for the site never managed to support on its own.

When people asked me what I did, I replied: “I write a website about local politics.” Sometimes, once they asked what it was called, they at least vaguely recognize the site’s name.

And then, at the end of this past Summer, I stopped.

Which makes for two relevant questions: Why? And does it offer any lessons for the question at hand about the mainstream media of the future?

When I launched Portland Communique, it was purely as a personal exercise. Having lived here for five years, I was determined to learn more about Portland. Committing to writing about it every day seemed the way to do that, as it would require reading more — and more deeply — than I had been. Ultimately, no matter how widely-read the site became, it always was a commitment to myself.

Most blogging is a personal exercise, of course. It’s why we blog, and it’s why we sometimes take a sudden hiatus and usually why we sometimes quit.

That rare breed of full-time bloggers struggles not only with their own level of interest in the endeavor, but with the everyday challenges of paying their bills.

For me, the loss of interest stemmed in no small part from feeling like I was beating my head against a brick wall. Too many elected officials, political candidates, newspaper columnists, and local bloggers opt for demagoguery over debate.

Two examples stick in my mind.

In the debate over the Portland Development Commission, some bloggers who were critical of the agency took advantage of the legitimate questions being raised over its activities, by attacking PDC not only for its mistakes but for its mere existence as Portland’s urban renewal agency.

While these critics might or might not have perfectly fair questions about urban renewal in general, and apart from the specific problems with how PDC conducted some of its business, to blame the agency for the realities of Oregon’s urban renewal laws isn’t an example of public policy debate, but of pure pandering.

That’s cheap exploitation in the name of scoring rhetorical points, and it does a disservice to civic discourse.

But that sort of posturing certainly isn’t restricted to bloggers. A local newspaper columnist once chided Multnomah County for planning a “green roof” on the County headquarters at a time when local needs such as public safety weren’t being adequately met.

The problem, as I pointed out at the time, is that the money for the one couldn’t simply be moved over to the others.

While that might be frustrating, it’s the way much funding of local government activities occurs. Certain funding sources are dedicated to certain activities, and restricted from other uses. One could reasonably, of course, attack that reality of government funding.

But simply to write a column which inherently implies that the County could, if it but chose to do so, move the money over, say, to fund public safety misinforms and deceives the public, once again in the name of scoring cheap rhetorical points.

It happens all the time here. I tried — with varying degrees of success — to steer my readers’ understanding of local politics away from demagoguery and towards debate.

In the end, it wasn’t really that I lost interest in local issues, but that I lost interest in constantly running up against that wall of demagoguery.

Certainly the wall is nothing new, nor is it restricted to Portland. And I’m not arguing that the local blogosphere is all demagoguery and no debate. What I’m arguing is that my work as a full-time blogger exposed me to more demagoguery like the above examples (from officials, candidates, columnists, readers, and bloggers alike) than I could handle.

As I said, it was with varying degrees of success, but what I sought to do with Portland Communique was make a knowledge of local politics more accessible to people.

That seemed to be something Portland needed, as I learned from the attention received by my coverage of the Sam Adams/Nick Fish race for City Council. Given that local television news stations all but ignored that race (unofficial recollections by both candidates suggested that only one story had been done about it), was anyone in town even aware that fully three out of five Council seats were up for grabs last year? That’s a Council majority, and local TV news didn’t care.

Making this sort of knowledge of local politics more accessible to people requires fact, not fiction. In the end, perhaps I simply didn’t have the stomach for what turned out to be a much more difficult than expected fight to get any signal heard through the noise.

Portland Communique unquestionably was widely-acclaimed by a broad spectrum of people — as long as you narrow your focus to those people who go out of their way to find local coverage of local issues. Most people in town know The Oregonian, they know KGW, and they know KXL. They don’t know Portland Communique. And that creates certain, shall we say, market realities.

So, despite the popular presumption, I didn’t quit because of the money, although without question the reader-supported site simply was not financially self-sustainable.

But money isn’t irrelevant either. It will continue to be next-to-impossible for anyone to do original reporting via weblog on a full-time basis absent real financial support. National-level bloggers, to some extent, have been able to pull off blogging as full-time work, but the dynamics which make that possible don’t appear to scale down to the local level.

I don’t know the solution to that — but without one, local blogospheres here and elsewhere will continue to suffer.

That doesn’t mean that local blogospheres somehow are irrelevant if they aren’t lucky enough to have any full-time blogger-journalists. Blogging as a form fulfills an increasingly important function of filling in the cracks between traditional news coverage and expanding access to a larger pool of citizen voices.

What’s considered “mainstream” media is a function of what’s available to people, not a function of how that media functions or what it covers. There is not much that is more mainstream than people seeking out information and opinion to help them make sense out of their lives. As more people turn to blogs for this, that may make them mainstream, but it doesn’t have to mean the blog form somehow has “sold out”.

But however “mainstream” blogs become, even in that sense, my hope remains that locally-oriented bloggers can find a way to cut through the noise of demagoguery with the signal of debate. But that’s going to require both a strong stomach and some way to pay them to do it.

While I quit because I could no longer stomach the demagogues, who knows what might have happened if I wasn’t also struggling to pay my bills. That’s a part of the experiment that I simply never got to run.