And where do you fit in?

Eric Zorn asks ArchPundit Five Easy Questions, the latter of which is of interest to me:

5. In all modesty, describe your current place in the blogosphere and where you see that place and your role in the future of this medium.

I think that along with a few folks like South Knox Bubba and Off the Kuff by Charles Kuffner, I'm the first wave of state politics blogs.

While I love talking about national politics, it's always seemed to me that state and local politics were the areas that could most be reinvigorated by web logs.

Larger media outlets have limited resources and even Congressional races are only given cursory coverage. Given our lives are most affected by state and local governments from school boards to state legislatures it seems strange that information about them is the most lacking.

I hope that in Illinois, and to a lesser extent in Missouri, my coverage offers insight into those levels of government.

I don't have any pretensions that my site is able to do this all by itself, but I think it may be one of the first to really address those issues and hopefully be a starting point for others.

That fairly well sums up how I see myself with regard to Texas and Texas politics. I've got a lot of good company in this, too. (That's a partial list, before anyone I've overlooked gets mad at me.) I've been very unhappy with the level of coverage of Congressional and State House races this year, and from where I sit this is one place where blogs have helped fill in the gaps. At the risk of sounding immodest, I'd say the Texas Tuesdays tour of State House races will almost assuredly tell you more about many of them than you'll find anywhere else.

I've said before that the blog style is well suited for campaign coverage in a newspaper's online edition. Amateurs like me can only do so much. Among other things, I'm not following the school finance lawsuit as closely as I should. Only so many hours in the day and so many brain cycles to go around. But I do think I'm adding something, even if it is just a glorified press-clipping service sometimes, and I'm happy with that. Thanks for the kind words, ArchPundit!

Posted by Charles Kuffner on September 08, 2004 to Blog stuff | TrackBack