I refuse to give The New York Times the hard earned Google juice and page rank I have earned with my blogs. When I checked out their new design I noticed their "Most blogged" box linking to .... no blogs. Excuse me? How can you know it is most blogged if you don't show who is blogging to you in the first place?

Well, I'm glad I am not the only one who noticed.

[via New York Times faux "most blogged" list -- what a bunch of leeches. - The Jason Calacanis Weblog]:

Just when you think the NYT is starting to get it they create a "Most Blogged" list *without* the back up data of who's blogging the stories!!!

Come on NYT... would it kill you to link to a blog!??!?!?!

Let me get this straight: you'll mine the data from the blogosphere to make your list, but you won't reward the blogosphere by linking back?!?!?!

That makes you a bunch of leeches--you take but you give nothing.

You see, the more we link to them, the not only the more traffic the get, but the higher in Google ranking they will be. And that is worth money. A. LOT. OF. MONEY. Jason Calacanis knows this. That's why he calls them leeches.

So boo to them.

Washington Post, on the other hand ... Thanks to Technorati, they get my heart-felt, "Yeah!"

Sure, they fucked up royally with Ben Domenech, but at least they acknowledge the existence of blogs ... more importantly my blogs.

Other blog friendly publications?

Ben says that Freddy Ferrer poisoned his relationship with the press. Ben claims the press coverage was fine but that Ferrer off-hands attitude at first and then

Patrick says that NYT was the only newspaper that covered the issues, policy proposals. NYT asked daily the Ferrer campaign asking for the big policies. "Where are the ideas?" and the campaign kept telling they were coming. They actually wanted to give him a platform when New York Post and New York Daily News were writing about the polls and declaring the race over.

Evelyn also did issue pieces. "For the most part those pieces were responsible pieces". When you run into trouble when you start running the pieces about the reporters point of view ... how the frame it. She says that those kinds of pieces the media were kind unfair. She says the elite of the city --the people that write the checks, own the real estate-- they made the decision that Ferrer was in no way going to be the mayor of the city. One of the issues is incumbency. Beyond that, I do believe that the powers that be decided that Mike was the one and Ferrer was portrayed as a loser." The underdog quality of his campaign came too late in the game. "There is a mentality that sets in among reporters that are covering the same story ... you are all getting tired of the same candidate at the same time ... I think that journalists do think in packs ... you get often a similar take". We got complaints and criticism was too skewed for Freddy, nobody is exempt. The pollsters, the media and the elite decided he was not going to win.

Patrick disagrees : "There were sort of moments that Freddy could put something together. The question is could he build on that." When things changed was after the blog story. We made a decision to not write about polls unless we ran them. The Times made a decision to not do that. About the elite decisions, though, that is true.

Ben The decisions that went on the

Jonathan Mandell from Gotham Gazette : He asked how many people read GG and how many people voted. A mojority of the people raised their hands : "You are New York specialits." 1.2 million voted at the last election out of the 4.7 million of elegible voters. Bloomberg's mandate comes from only out of the 15% of elegible voters. If the point of the campaign is to ask New Yorkers who is going to govern, then the system is obviously broken.

Pat says that an underdog campaign like Ferrer's has to have a serious media strategy from the get go.

Mandell :

(1) The system is broken because the media focused on the mayoralty when there were 200 candidates running.

(2) On the polls : This was not a horse race. Horse races are fast and exciting. This was more like a chess game. The reporting of polls is pointless, obscuring and inaccurate.

The Gotham Gazette does it different because, back in 2001, they started mapping out the candidates and the issues. They actually asked government offices and political groups and nobody had an actual system for disseminating this information.

Ben says that he writes about what his readers want to read. He can't do what Gotham Gazette because nobody would read him. It is not his responsibility to present the issues or scolding people into getting to know the issues.

Pat says that at the Times they do set themselves a mandate to educated people but wishes they had been more creative about how they went ahead with it.

OOH! We have a heckler. I've seen him at other events. A professional heckler?

Evelyn says that Bloomberg was very insulated. He never bothered to come into El Diario because the campaign decided that El Diario was not going to endorse him --even though El Diario started invited back in the Spring. She says that Bloomberg did not put position papers out to the press, that he was running a very safe campaign and that the media was not covering his position papers. El Diario put out an editorial because they felt it was unfair how they treated the issue. The media was very unfair through out the campaign started way back in the spring.

Evelyn's point was that Bloomberg had the money to pay for negative campaigning and that makes an impact when you have someone feeding the media gossip and negative reporting.

Pat says that the mayor was influenced by NYT and other's discussing Ferrer's issues... The tabs from Diallo onward smelled blood on the water, they never gave him a break and were all over him relentlessly.

Mandell says that politics are for specialists but the every day life, that is most important. If the coverage is all about the polls, photoshopping instead of pot holes and every day life issues. The conduct of the campaign has some bearing but one of the things that disturbed me ... this is not the fault of the intelligent people covering the elections ... my thinking is that there are 3 basics : (1) character, (2) competence and (3) issues. The problem I have is with the imbalance of how the information is presented. The problem is with the narrative, of how it is framed.

Questions from the audience:

(1) Who gets to decide who is a legitimate candidate?
There is a consensus that resources were only allocated to the main characters or, as Pat said, 'star' endorsements.

(2) Same with sources. Andrea asks is it a priority to the newspapers to get more than the same 2 or 3 experts and/or advocates that get quoted all the time.

(3) To Evelyn: Did you document how the real estate and finance community were working to kill off Ferrer? She says EDLP did not consistently write about this and they did not pick up on it intellectually. "It was very hit and miss." She says they did cover the lukewarm endorsements, how Democrats did not want to make any commitments of money until after the primary.

Stopping right now. Will post the podcast afterwards.

For the final results, check out Gotham Gazette Campaign 2005 - November 8, 2005 General Election Results

I urge everybody to read Micah Sifry's post-mortem of the Rasiej campaing.

[via micah.sifry.com]:

Emboldened by a sense that the Internet is enabling more people to participate, inspired by all the evidence of public disaffection with politics as usual, and motivated by a desire to push a 21st century vision of government and civic life, we dove in and tried to put into practice what many of us have been talking about. What follows is meant to be a continuation of that conversation, neither its beginning nor its end.

It's an amazingly candid and insightful review of not just what happened but what everybody in grassroots politics could be learn from their experiences. Awesome work that merits a third reading before I comment on it.

Ben over at The Policker talks about the retroness of the Bloomberg's campaign tactics in The Politicker: The Return of the Telephone - NYO. I have to agree with him and I am going to go one further (because I already did here : Bloomberg knew that Ferrer was going to hit the pavement and so he did as well. He used his money to buy himself a grassroots to destroy the Democrats effort. And contrary to what would be the obvious, many of these 'grassroots' by my own account were immigrant men from the Caribbean and Indian/Pakistan region. Or at least they were the ones who were unleashed on my kneck of the woods.

And of course, there is the level headed op-ed from Gigi E. Georges and Howard L. Wolfson, Singing the Blues in a Blue City on the matter of campaign financing:

One way to avoid repeating this situation is to re-examine the city's campaign finance law. We do not think it wise to infuse more public money into campaigns, but when candidates who pay for their own campaigns significantly exceed the law's spending limits, opponents who stay within the system should be permitted to raise larger contributions.

And I can't believe Will over at OnNYTurf posted a snippet of an email from a discussion a few of us had about the Ferrer campaign : Blame the campaign not the candidate. Or as Mole wrote on that email :

"They started out HORRIBLY organized and improved to merely poorly organized. But a couple of days before the election, it seemed to me that the whole campaign was unraveling. I heard reports from organizers that their Ferrer contacts in essence threw up their hands and told our people that we were on our own. This meant that on election night, there was almost no Ferrer campaign presence. At PS 321, one of the highest turnout polling places in the city, from 5:30-7 PM I was the only Ferrer person there. No one was there before me from what I could tell, and when I called in to the people I knew covering the district I learned that because the Ferrer campaign had sent them no people, they couldn't cover PS 321 at all. Folks, that is SURRENDER by the Ferrer campaign. In the end, we did more for Ferrer than his own campaign did, I think."

I honestly believe that the people who were working for Ferrer fucked it up out of not just incompetence but lack of true support for him. Can we discuss career politickers for a moment? These consultants that go from campaign to campaign : Are they doing it just for the paycheck or are they working from a core set of liberal values? Because, honestly, I was slammed with a lot of cynicism from the Ferrer people.

If you have not done so yet, go check out the Gotham Gazette's Campaign 2005 - Mayoral Candidates: Grid.

Chockfull of information it really is a fast way to check where the candidates stand and compare in issues such as immigrant voting rights, the smoking ban, city finances, anti-terror plans and civil rights.

I hope they do the same next time with all major electoral positions in the city. This would be an amazing resource to have in the future.

Check it out! Gotham Gazette suggests taking a look at Daily Gotham.

Published today:

The Daily Gotham

This blog consists of
several authors' interpretations of local and national politics, coming
from a liberal perspective. The blog also seeks to provide ammunition
and motivation for potential political activists. On three consecutive
days, Daily Gotham lamented the Parks Department's failure to keep up
its out-of-the-way properties, advised its readers about a forum
focused on lobbying for secure voting, and feared the impending
retirement of a Supreme Court Justice.

Thanks, GG!