Speak Up WNY
By Anna Hausmann

Speak Up WNY
Speak Up WNY is the brainchild of Tony Fracasso and three writers who were looking for an outlet for their views. “We wanted to allow people to post their opinions and not be edited. We wanted no agenda, just to be able to write the way we wanted.” In their role as the most widely read online forum in Western New York, they’ve gotten that wish in spades. Speak Up Western New York routinely logs several thousand visitors to the site each month. Their highest numbers were achieved in February of this year, the height of the county fiscal mess, when almost ten thousand unique visitors logged on. This past June nearly eight thousand visitors read almost three hundred thousand posts on the site.

The site consists of a news page, written by the staff writers, who provide their take on local and national news. People can also contribute to this page through letters to the editor, which are edited. The real meat of the site is the huge message board on which anyone can post. This is not edited, and can become a free-for-all discussion. “We get lots of return visitors,” Fracasso says. “The message board gets a lot of back and forth going.”

When asked to characterize Speak Up WNY, Fracasso turned to his members and asked what is means to them. One frequent commentator, Lars, summed it up this way: “As an incredibly tiny representation of the population of Erie County, the forums on Speak Up WNY are a microscopic measure of the opinions, attitudes, and demographics of the community.” He goes on to assert that Speak Up has “concentrated and amplified the voices of activists and pacifists alike who, as individuals, were previously a statistically insignificant nuisance to the establishment,” and that the forum has “level(ed) the playing field.”

These comments show that the overwhelming focus of Speak Up has been the county financial crisis. Fracasso says that the topics of discussion have varied from national politics to the war in Iraq to the Worldcom scandal, but that dominating this year have been events on the local scene. In fact, the site’s preoccupation with local events has attracted attention from local politicians, and political wanna-bes. “We don’t know who they are, but a lot of local politicians are logging on and reading. Plus, seven of the current candidates for the county legislature have started to use our board to introduce themselves and shape their views on issues through our members’ comments and concerns.”

Anna Hausmann is a contributing editor of Buffalo Spree.


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