Disclosures
Politics: I forget whether I am a registered Republican or Independent at the moment. Regardless, I am a libertarian-leaning conservative and I almost always vote Republican. I worked for the Bush 2 administration for a year as a speechwriter for the Office of the United States Trade Representative. When I was there, the current World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, was the USTR. I seriously loathe John McCain, but I will most likely vote for him.
My actual involvement in politics has been almost nil for a long time. In my entire adult life, I have made one political donation: $1,000 to SlateCard and that was more as an advertisement for RightyBlogs.com since they made a big deal out of RightyBlogs.com sponsoring their trip to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). I have also volunteered a little, working for Ben Nelson for Governor (of Nebraska where he’s now the Democratic Senator) when he ran against a tax-raising Republican back in the late ’80s. When I was in college at the University of Iowa I did some volunteer work for Tom Tauke, a Republican Senate candidate who crashed and burned against Tom Harkin
Journalism: I love newspapers and I still subscribe in their dead tree form. I have worked for them most of my career. At USA Today, I was letters editor, an op-ed editor and an editorial writer. At The Detroit News I was a Washington correspondent. At The Washington Examiner, I was the founding editorial page editor. At the Virginian-Pilot, I was an editorial writer.
I think the continued existence of newspapers’ in some form — most likely on the Internet with a smaller and smaller printed paper adjunct — is critical to democracy. Most importantly, the deepest context and analysis is printed in newspapers. They put in the man hours to produce critical investigative journalism that would not exist without them.
Blogs: The blogosphere is critical to saving newspapers from themselves.
Large corporations have handed over newsrooms to a tribe of wandering news professionals with shallow roots in the community. Predominantly liberal-leaning news staffs have added to the disconnect. The blogosphere gives locals a voice and conservatives a chance to assure their side gets a fair hearing. I hope the power of the blogosphere, will ultimately force newspaper owners to change their hiring and promotion practices on the editorial and business side.
I built BNN to help magnify that power by growing the audience for local blogs. Our goal is to make the blogosphere more useful by making it easier for readers to find just the information they want quickly and easily while helping bloggers get better at what they do by providing them the information to more efficiently engage with their fellow bloggers and readers.
