Urban Vancouver

The Thunderbird's Vancouver Muncipal Election Reader's Digest

By Richard Eriksson on October 25, 2005 - 3:25pm

Urban Vancouver got a heads up today about The Thunderbird's coverage of Vancouver muncipal election in Vancouver's media. The Thunderbird Online Journalism Review covers mainstream media, alternative media, and weblogs. In their two weblog summaries (October 20th and October 24th), they've only covered one weblog, the Downtown Eastside weblog. That's fine, actually, since they've only really started and Downtown Eastside is one of the few weblogs with any substantial amount of commentary on Vancouver municipal politics. They need to widen their net, possibly using a tool like PubSub to track mentions of terms related to the municipal election, such as the politicians' names, columnists names, and so on. (Actually, the first feed I set up for people is one searching for the URL of their site, so that they can track references people make to their site.) Also, both times they link only to the front page of the weblog or media outlet: they need to be direct links to specific articles so that readers can more easily evaluate for themselves whether the summaries are fair. If their aggregator supports it (is it too much to assume they read their sources in an aggregator?) they can import the OPML file for the Urban Vancouver aggregator. Warning: it's quite the Vancouver firehose, so I wouldn't blame people if they weeded from our list.

The summaries of all types of media are nice, but I'd like some commentary, either about the subjects (i.e. the politicians or the issues) or the people writing the stories for the media. Vancouver's a small pond in many respects, but it would be nice to have some insight into how qualitatively the local opinion-makers and journalists are covering events around us. Right now it looks like a digest of local media coverage, which is nice, but that makes it essentially reblogging. There is value in reblogging if the links are directly to the articles they are summarizing, and one can figure out an editorial bent by examining what they leave in and out, but if there's no original research or opinion then the value stays stagnant. It's a good effort though, and should go some way in helping people like Darren Barefoot who need a little help in deciding whom to vote for.