WNY Blogging Comes of Age
By Anna Hausmann
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Alan Bedenko is an unlikely candidate for rabble-rouser, but that’s just what he is. By day the local attorney toils on car crashes, slips and falls, and other various and sundry torts. But his alter ego is Buffalo Pundit and his blog on the Buffalo political scene, as well as other choice topics, is one of the hottest online reads for those who want to be absolutely up-to-the-second on local politics and community issues.
Bedenko can be seen as the dean of the local blogosphere. His blog is frequently updated and comprehensive, addressing issues from national and state politics to local fiscal and political shenanigans, with a little car lust thrown in. Buffalo Pundit casts his gimlet eye on most everything, and since he reads voraciously from both print and online sources, reading his blog gets you informed about what others are writing and what the Pundit thinks about it all. Add in some sassy reader commentary and you’ve got an addictive brew of opinion, alternative news, and entertainment. What more could you want from your computer?
Like most blogs, Bedenko’s can shape-shift from the personal to the political, weaving in philosophical musings with astute political commentary flavored by an informed worldview. But largely, it is political. Born of his original blog, which started out focusing almost exclusively on national and international politics, and especially last November’s presidential election, Buffalo Pundit has morphed into a largely locally focused blog. “My main concern right now is trying to analyze and fix what ails Buffalo,” Bedenko says. “To me, that means fundamental change in Albany and Erie County.”
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In Western New York, blogs have also become the venue of choice for citizen revolt. So when we wanted to take the pulse of the so-called “taxpayer’s revolution,” we turned to Bedenko to give us the low-down on these virtual revolutionaries. We wanted to know the motives behind the blogging explosion, what issues start the bloggers’ engines, and how these modern-day Thomas Paines make the big leap from ranting to filling the streets.
We got some interesting answers from Buffalo Pundit and suggestions of some fascinating blogs to check out. But a revolution? Not so much.
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However, Tony Fracasso, who started Speak Up WNY, feels the potential for grassroots action is there in bulletin boards. He feels his forum has been very effective in fostering the kind of back-and-forth interaction that can move from discussion to action. Fracasso points to lots of return visitors reading thousands of posts on his bulletin board and exhorting one another to make phone calls or sign petitions or attend rallies. He points out that Speak Up WNY presented a petition against raising the county’s sales tax to the County Legislature that had over five thousand signatures generated online. They also used the bulletin board to boost attendance at rallies at County Hall during the early summer.
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Newell Nussbaumer, editor of
BuffaloRising Magazine and co-moderator of the Buffalo Rising Journal. (see sidebar). Photo by Jim Bush. |
So to Johnson and Nussbaumer, muckraking in the Inspections Department is just part of trying to push toward New Buffalo, “the city we love for what it is and what it aspires to.” Johnson notes that BRJ’s content differs from both mainstream media and most news-type blogs. “A lot of our content is reflective or proactive, not reactive—and I don’t mean to use ‘reactive’ pejoratively. I love reading other local bloggers who analyze and expand upon stories that appear in the mainstream media. The majority of our content is stuff local mainstream media isn’t covering, or stuff we think we can cover differently, if not better.”
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Bedenko feels blogs are most effective as venues for in-depth questioning of local issues, of going beyond the two-minute piece in the mainstream media, of giving feedback, which can lead to new ideas. “It fills a gap by asking questions. Discussion gets the ideas out there.” As an example, Bedenko points to an idea he raised late in February 2005 on Buffalo Pundit to completely do away with county government, as has been done in Massachusetts. “At that time, no one was talking about that, but since I posted that I’ve heard several other people including local politicians suggest it. So a real extreme idea enters the discussion.”
Though the blogging phenomenon has exploded in just the last few years, it has become even more visible locally since it has taken on the role of galvanizing people over the city and county’s financial problems. Local news media have relied on viewer/listener/reader response through their website bulletin boards to gauge, and sometimes to whip up, public ire. But they’ve also used the public’s questions and tips to develop story lines and push their reporting, putting viewers in the position of driving the news rather than as passive recipients of it.
This truly is a revolutionary view of news and represents a completely new type of grassroots action. Or a new version of a very old form of activism, a return of news to its roots in the town crier and the handbill. Either way, it is a big step forward from the image of passive masses being spoonfed the network and cable party line.
And for the bloggers? Is it just the online version of a vanity press, an electronic form of navel-gazing, the ultimate solipsistic experience? Though blogging extended to its most extreme form could mean each of us ensconced in our cubbies, tapping out our solitary thoughts, living in our own little universes, that’s not the reality. What happens is that the lone voices ring true for others and what you thought of perhaps as your own opinion, the hallmark of blogging, is actually many people’s opinions. Blog and they will come.
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As Bedenko describes it, the beauty of blogging is that you can “select an issue with laser-like precision and opine and write about whatever you want.” Nussbaumer agrees, noting that a blog “allows people to pick and choose voices they want to hear. You can find blogs that enhance your life and check them all day long. And I get personal satisfaction knowing I can help to change the city’s image.”
OVERVIEW OF BLOGS
The blogs that cover Western New York issues span the spectrum from cheerleading to full-out tar-and-feather-’em ire, with everything in between. Some are true blogs, in the sense that they are weblogs or online diaries of commentaries both personal and philosophical. Some are forums or bulletin boards, which may or may not permit commentary on others’ postings. Most blogs offer readers the chance to post comments, and sometimes that can get a real dialogue going. Sometimes the bulletin boards also erupt into genuine roundtable discussion. But sometimes both can dwindle down to isolated ravings. The difference is many voices coming to consensus or collaborating as opposed to the lone voice crying out in the wilderness. Here’s a print tour through the virtual world of the Buffalo blog, through the eyes of Buffalo Pundit.
Buffalo Beast – Like a local version of the national blog Rude Pundit, this blog is hilariously offensive with a rude take on all things local and political. It is similar to Buffalo Rising in that it functions like a daily offshoot of their weekly free paper. They’re left-of-center, extremely irreverent, and very funny. They obviously have fun writing their stuff. Currently beefing with Politics WNY, a local political blog, over their calling out the political site as a shakedown operation trading paid political ads for positive coverage in possible violation of state election law.
www.buffalobeast.blogspot.com
Buffalo Rising – This blog is part of their website, which is an extension of Buffalo Rising, the magazine published by Newell Nussbaumer, focusing primarily on the West Side and Elmwood area of Buffalo. The site focuses primarily on events throughout the city, touting festivals and concerts and highlighting locally owned businesses. The regular members (that’s contributors or the equivalent of columnists, for those of us blog newbies) are Queenseyes, who is Nussbaumer, and Figmo, who is George Johnson, as well as roughly ten other members. The blogs chat about the neighborhood, and sometimes the commentary veers into controversial terrain. But the site itself is decidedly non-political with the emphasis on Buffalo-boosting. If you want to feel good about Buffalo, by all means visit this site. It’s kind of like “we’re talkin’ proud” for generation next, a wryly self-effacing but ultimately unabashedly upbeat view of the city. One feature of the site is a page of positive comments about Buffalo from publications across the nation; another is posts from ex-pat Buffalonians on their struggles to come back home.
www.buffalorising.blogspot.com
Fix Buffalo – This site focuses almost exclusively on structures on the East Side owned by the city, especially the Woodlawn Row Houses in the Masten District, which have fallen into disrepair. The author saves a great deal of his ire for the City of Buffalo, which owns many of the properties he highlights. The city is apparently immune from any sort of action to reverse its demolition by neglect. The site and blog focus on the beautiful vernacular architecture of the East Side and advocates to end the blight that plagues the neighborhood.
www.fixbuffalo.blogspot.com
Free Buffalo – The original “taxpayer’s revolt” site, started by Jim Ostrowski, who heads the local group of the same name. Born of the frustration over the county financial crisis, Free Buffalo is a bulletin board rather than a blog. The group Free Buffalo has brought a number of political neophytes into the local political scene. Bedenko sees Ostrowski’s group as losing momentum over the late spring and summer as his attendance at rallies has dwindled. Only this month’s primaries will tell if the group is actually tapping into a real vein of voter anger or is a flash in the political pan.
www.freebuffalo.org
Northcoast US – The yin to BuffaloPundit’s yang. Like BuffaloPundit, Craig Howard’s “America’s North Coast” wends its way through the mazes of national, international, and local politics. Unlike BuffaloPundit, Howard is a conservative. On issues concerning national issues, the two engage in healthy, heated, yet always civil, philosophical, and factual debates. Interestingly, however, they almost always agree on issues involving Western New York and Albany politics. Such non-partisanship is as telling as it is unexpected.
www.northcoastus.com
Politics WNY – Could be called the first purely commercial local blog. Blogger Joe Illuzzi, who also publishes a sleek monthly of the same name, posts every day though his posts are largely unexpurgated press releases from local elected officials, whose ads run down the side of the site. The site feels like paid political advertising as you read all these glowing PR reports accompanied by the smiling faces of one local pol after another. Illuzzi’s blogging is sometimes interesting and sometimes questionable, as with the recent saucy suggestion of sexual escapades involving Erie County legislators. Illuzzi has been trading verbal smackdowns with Buffalo Beast over his site’s ethics as well as their dissing his writing abilities.
www.illuzziletter.com
Revitalize Buffalo – Started out as the discussion arm of the group, Revitalize Buffalo. It’s an interesting site because people can post about things that don’t really fit on a website. It’s a sort of progressive version of the Metro Community News’ “Blow Off Your Steam” call-in column, without the typos.
www.revitalizebuffalo.blogspot.com
Speak Up WNY – This site isn’t necessarily a blog as much as it is everybody’s blog. Anyone can register and post an opinion, or even start a new topic thread. Generally, people are civil to each other, but the often-heated give and take is more reminiscent of old-fashioned, anything-goes usenet newsgroups. The site gets thousands of postings on a wide range of topics each month and consists of a news page and a message board where anyone can post responses to the news articles or to each other’s postings. Though the topics have varied since its inception it has been dominated recently by the county budget mess.
www.speakupwny.com
Anna Hausmann is a contributing editor of Buffalo Spree.
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