Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Russell Brown discusses the impact of NZ political blogs

From The Listener:

"Key isn’t the first politician to claim to have been misquoted to get himself out of a fix. But in the old days, it wasn’t so easy for journalists to bite back – and certainly not as rapidly as Young did. Remarkably, it was the second week in a row in which Young, in the less formal setting of her blog, had produced the week’s big political story.

Her account of an interview conducted the previous week with David Benson-Pope (“he misled me as well”) appears to have triggered the end of Benson-Pope’s ministerial career. Again, Young hadn’t mucked about: her post appeared online only an hour or so after the minister had offered his revised account of the Setchell affair during question time in the House...

These blogs have emerged as part of a burst of blogging on the two main newspaper sites. Stuff has had the best of it so far: Dave Moore and Guy Somerset, the Dominion Post’s motoring and books editors respectively, give every impression of having been unleashed, and tech commentator Juha Saarinen, recently hired by Fairfax Digital Media, has brought his popular Techsploder blog with him."

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