The new year has started with a bit of bang for the local internet…

General Election: Round 1

First out of the blocks came the #kerryout campaign on January 4. Nothing whatsoever to do with the grand dame of Tory blogging Iain Dale and put together by home counties Tory blogger Harry Cole – or ‘Tory Bear‘ – the campaign does pretty much what it says on the tin and is an effort to get Bristol East MP and Labour’s ‘Twitter Tsar’ Kerry McCarthy removed at this year’s general election. Bristol24-7 published a comment on the campaign a few days ago here.

Depending on who you speak to, the campaign is either “the future of political campaigning” (Tory bloggers) or is a barely legal, poorly targeted and ill-judged negative campaign on behalf of Bristol East Tory candidate, Adeela Shafi, that has little hope of making much of an impact on Ms McCarthy’s 8,000-odd majority (everybody else).

The fact that Ms Shafi, who has never had much of a profile locally anyway, has subsequently disappeared from view and avoided commenting on the campaign suggests there may still be some way to go with these very local and highly-targeted new media campaigns.

Blogger’s libel threat

Just one day later, more controversy as The Bristol Blogger was pulled from the internet by its blog host Wordpress citing ‘defamation’ in relation to articles about former UWE vice-chancellor and arch-privatiser, Howard Newby.

It turned out that Newby, now at the University of Liverpool, had used his university’s own legal department to approach and threaten Wordpress who immediately removed articles from blogs including The Bristol Blogger, Ecologics and Howard Newby Watch.

An undertaking that sent a brief frisson of outrage around the internet, attracting the attention of Index on Censorship among others. The Bristol Blogger has now temporarily shut its site, to remove it from Wordpress’s control and is seeking a new internet host. Meanwhile the episode and its implications are being analysed in some detail by Ecologics – run a former UWE lecturer – and by local blogger Bristle KRS.

Gritting campaign

The new year also saw the first sight of a successful local grassroots Twitter campaign – #gritforbristol. Initially based around complaints about the lack of grit on the city’s pavements, the campaign spread across the city’s blogosphere to encompass stories about the council’s dubious legal advice on gritting, snow clearing policy in Seattle and even a late night gritting trip undertaken by the cabinet member responsible, Jon Rogers.

Considerable policy changes at the council are expected to follow and the campaign may have created a useful template for the future.

Asking for power

Finally, an interesting development from the council who have set up a Wordpress blog of their own, Ask Bristol. Currently being used as a more accessible site for their ‘Ask Bristol’ consultations, there’s little sign of the interactivity and debate that really constitute blogging as yet.

But it’s early days and, if the council take the initiative a little more, this could be an interesting development for both the council and the public. For instance, were the blog to engage quickly and directly with a campaign like #gritforbristol, you might find the power of local news editors to set and control the city’s political agenda under threat as the public and the council discover their ability to set and control this agenda for themselves.

We shall have to see.

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