Press Releases versus Blogs
An academic researcher has asked TheyWorkForYou.co.nz if the site “got a traffic spike during the campaign”.
The short answer is no. There was no traffic spike during the election lead-up.
Friends recommended I put out a press release about the party bill voting analysis. A few things prevented me from producing press releases, one was my time was too limited to write them. To be honest, my strength lies the ability to design and code the software behind the site, not the articulation of sound bites for news stories.
Also I have a reluctance to rely on the old commercial media apparatus. Based on my observations the commercial media appears to produce material laced with implicit political spin and distortion, while purporting, at least on the surface, to be journalism.
Independent political blogs are now producing timely, in-depth coverage that is in some ways superior to that of the commercial media. Though blogs are also often loaded with political bias, they are at least are open about where they stand.
For now I’ll concentrate on adding more features to TheyWorkForYou.co.nz. For publicity I’m going to rely on others to help promote the site. If the site is valuable then over time this approach will be successful.
Thanks to those that mentioned the party bill voting analysis last week, including: the comparing the parties post at No Right Turn; and wombleton’s #nzelection hotness tweet on twitter.
