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Local candidate blogs in Durham

The Durham Herald-Sun has launched a candidate blog page for local elections and offered all local candidates the opportunity to have a Weblog. So far seven candidates have signed up.

This is a fantastic idea and one other local sites should emulate.

Other sites have offered locals blogs, but The Herald-Sun's approach is particularly interesting because it's actually coaching the candidates, some of whom are unexperienced in the world of blogs.

"I'm sending them periodic emails about blogging and sent them links to Rebecca Blood's weblog ethics article," Jon C. Ham, director of digital publishing at the Herald-Sun, tells Ed Cone on EdCone.com. "Some seem to know the drill. Others are totally in the dark but intrigued. My guess is it might take an election cycle or two to get this cemented."

Ham's always been ahead of his time in using the Web to create communication between politicians and his audience. The newspapers Votebook site won a 1996 Digital Edge Award for Public Service.

More from Ham via Ed Cone: "Our candidate blogs are under our VoteBook umbrella. VoteBook is a site I dreamed up in 1995 (you can tell I was a political scientist in a former life) to allow unmediated communication (you can tell I was a gubernatorial press secretary too) from local candidates to voters (it won the first Digital Edge Public Service Award in 1996, by the way). We don't even edit their essays. Last year one candidate's was so filled with grammar and typographical errors that we were accused of trying to sabotage her campaign. But our view is that if you don't have the common sense to let a friend edit your VoteBook essays and questionnaires then maybe you shouldn't be in office.

Here's how they're making it work: "We wrote our own blog application instead of using one of the well-known ones. I'm a blog fan (but not a blogger; too many conflicts with this job) so I worked with our main IT programmer to get it into some form that blog fans would understand. It's in our main template, which was just easier for us to do. It has all the bells and whistles for posting (hyperlink, boldface, italic, blockquote, etc.) It's simplified a bit -- no trackback, but we have permalinks."

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