Olympia Time

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Unfiltering the legislative session

April 8, 2009 / / 0 Comments

The response to the fewest number of credentialed reporters covering the legislative session wasn’t that a blogger was eventually credentialed, but rather this.

Or, a lot of stuff like that.

This winter and spring the four caucuses (but the Dem ones the most and the Senate Dems the most most) have been rolling out social media tools that allow them to directly connect with the people that would typically read legislative coverage.

  • Sen . Lisa Brown is writing a seriously blunt blog, taking issues on in a somewhat dense, but very direct way. House Dems also have a less fun blog, but its still there.
  • Each caucus has embraced twitter (SD, HD, HR, SR), though I’m a bit unsure of how this is an advancement beyond or just the use of a tool. Here’s a funny thing about caucus twitter feeds. I though I was already following the senate Republicans because I followed WASenateGOP. Turns out that is their campaign committee and the actually caucus twitters at WashingtonSRC.
  • Same thing with each caucuses use of video and audio casts. Its great to make all the stuff available, but its another thing to distill it in some form.

Does the lack of reporters covering the legislature drive the caucuses to adopt social media? Probably not, I’ve heard conversations around these topics for years, but everyone was getting hung up on rules (that you apparently couldn’t blog during session because it was campaigning? Weirdness).

Its more likely that the ramping up of caucus based social (or at least internet) media and the nose-dive of traditional state house reporting are happening on parralel, if not slightly overlapping, tracks.

The bed newspapers find themselves in

April 7, 2009 / / 0 Comments


If anyone really doubts that newspapers owners created the situation they’re in now, you should read: The Chain Gang.

Shorter Chain Gang: Instead of being happy with an industry where even the laziest newspaper with a local monopoly could make 5 percent profit a year, newspaper chains drove out local competition (possibly with illegal tactics) and borrowed heavily to buy up even more local papers.

But, now 20 or 30 years later, the model doesn’t work anymore and the pile of cards is tumbling down.

It isn’t journalism that’s broken, its the economic model of local monopolies owned by chains saddled with debt and unrealistic profit margins driven by public ownership.

Recent metonymy of Olympia links (and a few thougts on liberals)

April 6, 2009 / / 0 Comments

1. The Washington bus basically points out that Oly(mpia) ain’t a city, but rather a collection of gray, greek-wannabe buildings.

By the way, saying “Oly” doesn’t make you young and hip. I’ve heard 70 year olds say Oly without any irony. It makes you sound like a poser.

2. Clark Williams-Derry: “Heads up, Salem & Olympia,” and then something on climate change. Once we can tell Seattle and Bellevue what to do, we’ll get right on that.

3. The Seattle Courant: “Olympia: Gas Tax Revenue Down, Tolls and $4.3 Billion in New Transportation Spending.” Our gas tax revenue may be down, I’m not really sure if we have a local gas tax, but so are they for every locality, I would assume.

4. Andrew: “Although the Worker Privacy Act is dead (no thanks to Olympia)…” We can’t take credit or blame for what your representative does while they’re inside our city. So, bite me.

That last links brings a thought together for me. You see, I read a lot of political stuff and I keep an eye out for metonnymic uses of Olympia (or people who I know do so for me now). And, I’ve seen a lot more liberals use Olympia to mean the state government or the state legislature than conservatives.

Might just speak to my reading list which has a lot more liberal outlets than conservative, but I don’t avoid right wing blogs and sources by any means. It just surprises me any time I hear a liberal use the metonymic Olympia.

And, this is why: It gets back to the othering of government. That if your state government is “Olympia,” some distant crap-ass place where crazy people make decisions for you, you really aren’t to blame for what’s going on.

But, if Olympia is just another town, and the state legislature is made up of locally elected folks and the governor is elected by a statewide popular election, then we’re all to blame for what goes on inside our government.

Conservatives like othering government because they don’t trust government and don’t want it to work. You’d think liberals would be of a different mind.

More in the Rich Nafziger bloggin’ chronicles

April 2, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Over at Olyblog, Russ Lehman, an old opponent of Rich Nafzigers when they were both on the Olympia School Board, takes a swipe at Nafziger and his blog:

The flap over Rich Nafziger’s blog, where he comments about the very un-Democratic way we make laws and policies in Olympia, as well as his view of the Governor as, well, somebody less than the leader we need at this time of crisis, misses the point just as the comments about our city council members who have the attention span and restraint of children missed the most important point about their egregious behavior.

The voices of disgust about certain city council member’s prurient and truly anti-Democratic impatience and intolerance, focuses on the violations of the Open Public Meetings Act instead of the true “crime” committed – an affront to our very Democracy. They validated people’s worst fears about policymaking – that politicians are interested in primarily, if not only, the interests of those who can pay to have their voice heard.

Nafziger is right about what plagues our lawmaking system. It is not truly interested in “the little guy’s” voice; responds very differently to those who make a living lobbying; is populated by many (though not all) people who seem much more interested in ego gratification then open, deliberative, courageous policymaking.

The problem is, according to those inside the Olympia beltway, not what he said, per se, it’s that he “pissed where he sleeps”. The common refrain in Olympia is that he was crazy to lambaste his political patrons (read: bosses).

Also, if you’re interested in reading everything Nafziger has put on his blog and then regularly takes right back down, I’ve tried to share as much as I can here. The posts aren’t in order of when they were posted by Rich, but rather by when I marked them in my feed reader. So, you may need to dig around a bit before you find what you are looking for. Like the one where he gives Gov. Gregoire a Hoover award.

Anyway, I’m going to ask him again in the comments of one of his blog posts why he keeps on taking his old posts down. I still wonder why

You’ll always have the Olympian

March 30, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Because McClatchy will never be as stupid as the owners of the King County Journal/Eastside Journal/Bellevue Journal-American/South County Journal/Valley Daily News.

A little background. Ken puts it out there that the end is nigh for the Olympian. The new Olympian publisher responds a little too directly.

Ok, so this is why:

For over ten years the owners of the King County Journal rearranged the masthead, trying to catch up with a readership that was running in the other direction. The problem is, as soon as you change the brand of a local product, you end the need for that local product. The two original papers (Bellevue Journal-American and Valley Daily News) had a combined circulation of 66,000 over ten years ago. That evaporated to a very optomistic 41,000 a decade later.

I’m convinced that even if they had consalidated all production in Kent (as they eventually did) and leave a small bureau in Bellevue, but producing two papers with different mastheads, there would still be two additional dailies in King County.

This sort of thing — reducing the cost of production by having it all in one place, but scattering reporters into their communities — is sort of what the eventual owners of the King County Journal did. While they shut down the dying daily, they actually ended up increasing news content in most of their communities by increasing montly newspapers to weeklies and starting new publications in some communities.

Anyway, McClatchy has pretty much moved all production — pagination, printing, copy editing — to Tacoma, but the Olympian remains.

And, if you look at how McClatchy is arranged nationally (here and here), this sort of “hub and spoke” arrangement is how they operate. There is generally a large dominant (parent) daily surrounded by a few smaller weeklies and dailies. All of the children properties maintain their identities and brands, but all non-essential functions are taken care of at the parent paper.

The team killed by one game (Belfast Celtic and Happy Saint Patrick’s day)

March 17, 2009 / / 0 Comments

On this St. Patrick’s Day, I remember Belfast Celtic, a team disbanded after a horrific game and its aftermath in the late 1940s. Despite their success, they were never admitted to the league system in Northern Ireland and were forced to hang it up due to fan on player violence.

From Wild Geese (which refers to this I assume):

That triumphal victory over the Scottish national side was several months ahead when the Celtic team took to Linfield’s pitch at Windsor Park, in staunchly unionist South Belfast, on Boxing Day 1948. Tension at matches between the two sides was always at a high. The match ended with the Celtic team having to run from the pitch for their lives when Linfield

fans poured over the terrace barriers at the end of a 1-1 draw. Centre forward Jimmy Jones was thrown over a parapet, kicked unconcious and left with a broken leg. Defender Robin Lawlor and goalkeeper Kevin McAlinden were seriously hurt.

More can be found at belfastceltic.org (hard site to link inside of without crashing firefox).

Belfast Celtic is also one of a dozen or so historic “celtic” teams across the world, many of whom wear the “celtic hoops” made famous by Glasgow Celtic. The Scottish Celtic team has their own storied past that straddles the sectarian violence in the United Kingdom, but unlike Belfast Celtic they surive to this day.

Tomorrow I’ll wear a jersey from another hoops team, Shamrock Rovers of Dublin. Rovers were a younger team than either Belfast or Glasgow Celtic and recieved their first set of uniforms from Belfast Celtic.

Local green party seen better days

March 15, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Patrick Mendendez would like to think the local Green Party is an alternative worth supporting, but they probably need something to bring them off of life support. They failed to even get a quorum to their recent organizational meeting:

NOTE — a follow-up meeting was planned in two weeks time; however, we did not achieve a quorum at that meeting and the organizers have dropped their efforts for the time being.

This is probably the worst time ever for the even-more-liberal-than-the-Democratic party in Thurston County to be falling on hard times. They have so many built in advantages, at least electorally speaking.

The Top Two primary, at least theoretically, could put them in the general election in two upcoming elections. I haven’t heard of any Republican candidate at all in the upcoming Thurston commissioner race. And, in the fall of 2010 there will be an open seat in the 22nd LD.

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