You climbed up to a rickety deck over the side porch by some wooden stairs. We guessed that no housing inspector had ever dropped by with a code book in his pocket. In the living room the day we went to see the house there was a note on the coffee table: You pigs! Clean up this mess! We all have to live here! it suggested. The real estate agent fumbled for words. It’s just what we want, we told her.

Every neighbor on the block told us how happy they were that we had bought the place, how they had endured the late night parties and loud music, the life guards’ robust all-hours social life. All but one. I miss seeing their perfect bodies up there on the deck, sighed the middle-aged blonde across the street. They were just wonderful to look at.

Now, what about pictures?

On a related note, RSS 1.0 feeds for Democratic House members Julia Carson of Indiana, Sam Farr of California and Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland (the URLs say RSS 2.0, but the .rdf extension seems to indicate otherwise).

I don’t know what most people expect to become of the campaign weblogs once the election is over, but here’s a guess that virtually none will survive to be incorporated into a government site. And if they do, they’ll be even less revealing than the campaign blogs, which aren’t exactly thrilling reading.

That’s because there is a huge difference between campaigns and governing, even taking into account the “permanent campaign” that became a hallmark of the Clinton administration. When you’re running for election, you need to appeal to lots of people who may not know you. Unless you’re the incumbent, you have little official infrastructure to depend upon, so a weblog is one way to get the word out and connect your supporters. But once you get elected, you have a bunch of competing priorities, not the least of which is doing the job you were elected to do. Frankly, I’d start to worry about a public official who spent tons of time posting to his or her weblog while in office.

In politics, weblogs can fill some roles. They can push a message into cyberspace (and sometimes into the mainstream media), they can give you a way of bringing people into your organization, and they can provide you with a platform. Weblogs are perfect for back-benchers, the minority party in Congress and insurgents. They’re not so good for incumbents, because for them it’s mostly about control. If I’m president (or senator or congressman), I’m breaking exactly no news on a website save for an Internet-specific initiative. Maybe that changes in a few years, but the idea of the Senate Majority Leader sitting down and writing “Just got back from a meeting with the chief lobbyist from XYZ Corp., and they want a tax break in the next bill going through the Finance Committee” is loopy. Government, as an institution, doesn’t work that way.

Weblogs have the power and the curse of being a mass medium, which means that even though they enable plenty of people to say exactly what’s on their minds to the world, chances are good that those people don’t want the entire world to read exactly what’s on their minds. Is it reasonable to assume that the same officials who issue mind-numbing press releases - if you like campaign blogs are boring, try some of these - would all of a sudden become Mr. or Ms. Candor on a website? (For those in doubt, the answer is “No.”)

During my time covering Congress, the only lawmakers I knew who spoke their minds nearly all the time did so because they were not particularly concerned by the consequences. It was a small group, with Ron Paul, Jesse Jackson Jr., Jeff Flake and Bernie Sanders among its members. It’s a stretch to say those four represent a good cross-section of the nation, but they would have entertaining weblogs.

So what, then? Change the way that government operates to promote candor? Ripping up the rules mid-game is a dicey proposition, and one that many incumbents would resist. Political scientists like to say that lawmaking and sausage-making are alike in that you don’t want to see either being done, you just want the end result. That’s only partly true. Watching the lawmaking process gave me endless insights into the people who run our nation. But those aren’t always the people you see on the campaign trail or in commercials or read about on their websites.

Weblogs could be a cure for that sort of glossing over, but there’s at least one very large obstacle: the power of the office. A president or member of Congress has any number of reasons to favor control over candor, and being hailed as a political blogging pioneer isn’t the sort of inducement that will change their minds.

Dave,

You didn’t acknowledge or respond to an earlier email I sent to your userland.com address (which may be why), so I thought I’d send one to you at Berkman. I’d just like an opportunity to respond to your claims about disclosure among public radio stations. I don’t work for a public radio station and I never have; I do listen to them, however.

Most affiliate public radio stations are operated as non-profit organizations, and thus have certain disclosure requirements under federal law. You, as a citizen, have the right to inspect those documents. The annual IRS 990 form (pdf) is the most commonly used source of information for non-profits, and it lists financial totals in a number of different ways, along with the salaries of the 5 highest-paid employees (chances are good that the station’s general manager is on that list). So you can see what she earns, in all likelihood. You probably won’t get a list of on-air talent salaries unless one of them happens to be among the top 5 overall. I have no specific knowledge of public radio salaries, but I cannot imagine that they would be lucrative except for the biggest stars. Radio, as a genre, doesn’t pay very much.

You can see the 990 Forms simply by showing up at the station’s offices and asking for them (it’s better to have a letter with a written request with you, in my experience). They’d have until the end of that day, under federal regulations, to provide you with copies of 3 most recent annual reports. If you mail your request to the station, the waiting period could extend to 30 days. Or, if you don’t want the station to know that you want to look at the documents, you can write to the IRS’ Odgen, Utah, office, which keeps them on file. They typically respond within 3-4 weeks. It’s not exactly public company reporting, but then you’d be unlikely to get a list of staff salaries at a public company, too. It certainly is better than nothing.

On a side note, I personally disagree with your opinion that “it’s reasonable to assume that they sell speaking spots too, stuff that sounds like editorial but is really commercial.” I’ve seen (or, to be more accurate, heard) no evidence of this, but I’d be interested to know if you have any.

Sincerely,
Derek Willis

Hardly. I dare to say that I was one of the first professional journalists to have an in-house, edited weblog, back when I worked for Congressional Quarterly (it was called “The Scoop” and it doesn’t exist anymore). And it worked fine, because I knew the editor’s expectations and tendencies, and he knew mine. We worked well together and rarely had a major disagreement over a blog item (stories sometimes were another matter).

What we both knew, and any editorial employee involved with a professional blog should know, is that the blog ultimately is the product of the news organization. If Daniel Weintraub, the Bee staffer in question, moves on to another paper and the Bee hires somebody else for his spot, presumably that person would also continue the blog (and compete with Weintraub for readers, no doubt). Editing isn’t incompatible with blogs, despite the cries of purists known for doing some editing themselves.

As with any new process, blogging has been a tricky idea for some newspapers and likely will be for some time. It is a different presentation of reportage than the ones they’re used to, and that can be a difficult hurdle for some folks. But fans of weblogs would do well to encourage blogging’s incorporation by the mass media, however flawed that process may be, rather than carping on editors for doing what they’re supposed to do.

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Let The Heritage Foundation count the ways … in “Medicare Maladies,” a daily feature highlighting the dangers of the Medicare bills now being negotiated in conference committee.

If you’re blogging about Medicare reform, you’ll find the “Medicare Maladies” series a lively brief on the proposals now being deliberated.

Each “Malady” puts one aspect of the debate under the microscope and in plain English. No. 3, for example, shows how many seniors will actually end up paying MORE for drugs than under the current proposals. Some “reform,” eh?

Meanwhile, No. 10 examines why Congress moved to exempt federal retirees (including retiredf members of Congress) from the proposed “benefit” they want to give everyone else.

You can check ‘em all out at http://www.heritage.org/research/healthcare/mm.cfm.

And, if you’d like to have future Maladies shipped straight to your terminal, subscribe by e-mail medicaremaladies@heritage.org or call Andrew Blasko at (202) 608-6149.

Interesting. I’m not sure where they got my email (not like it’s a state secret), but I’m curious as to why they thought I do this kind of stuff.