Chron clueless on blogging

I emailed this letter to the Chronicle on the 10th and it was the sixth letter published in the March 13 letters section:

The Chronicle's article on Supervisor Chris Daly's blog emphasizes it is on "the city's dime." I'm curious if there
was any attempt to find out just how much it is costing the city.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say how little. I wouldn't be surprised if it literally doesn't cost
much more than a dime. Certainly less than it costs to photocopy the the press releases and other
material put out by the Supervisors, Mayor, and other city officials. It is part of their job to help keep citizens informed.

More people in San Francisco government should be encouraged to blog from other politicians to
department heads to the little known experts on many issues who work for us and should communicate with us.

P.S. (not printed) The Chronicle should embrace blogging as well (beyond a few temporary poorly designed experiments).

PPS (not in letter): I agree with SFist that Daly should use better blogging software from a San Francisco company such as SixApart which allows comments.

Also, I wanted to keep the letter short. There is a lot more to this issue. I do think
there should be some guidelines for how city employees (from the Mayor on down) use blogs.
But more on that another time.

Another update (3/21): Daly says his research finds his blog doesn't even cost a dime.

Update: The Chronicle left a message saying they are considering printing my letter (and they did). I had letters printed in the Indianapolis News and Star when I was a teenager, US News & World Report, and a few other places, but this would be my first in the Chronicle.

Daly has posted a response to the article. He writes, "In the Chron story, there was no mention of the amount of public funds that go into this website, so I requested that information from the City’s head of the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS), Lewis Loeven, and will be reporting to you the exact cost (his initial reaction is that the costs are negligible). Paul Simon, the intern in my office who has been working with me on this site, is very upset about today’s article pointing out that he has been working on the site at no cost." I added the link to Paul's bio (he also shouldn't be confused with the late, great Senator from Illinois).

Daly says he doesn't want to use blogger because he wants his blog on the SF site. I'm sure he could get a volunteer to install Six Apart's Moveable Type.

The orginal headline I refer to in the letter was "Public picks up tab for Daly blog - District 6 supervisor first official to keep diary on city's dime" appeared in print and initially on the web. After complaints, it was changed online to "Daly starts blog on city Web site - District 6 supervisor first official to keep diary on city's site." There is note of the change on the article and ofcourse tens of thousands of people saw original headline on the front page of Bay Area section.

Alison writes about my post and a few others commenting on the Chron article.

On a related note, JD Lasica writes about Blogshine Sunday which is asking bloggers to join newspapers on March 13th in Sunshine Sunday when they are "running stories supporting access to government information." How you can participate.

The Bay Guardian has their annual Freedom of Information Issue. Here is a page from archive.org I put together when I was online editor with the contents of the 2001 issue and links to the 1997 - 2000 issues.

One way to blogshine is to both get more people in government blogging and more citizen blogging about government.

Comments

[AF]

Good point. They tried podcasting last week - did you catch it?

[Jackson West]

Thanks for the link, Steve. Yeah, wow, the Chron is really being a bitch in this case. Could the be just a little more obviously subjective in their coverage? "Hey, let's present just the facts, and by that we mean just the facts that make Chris Daly look bad!"

[Steve Rhodes]

You're welcome.

Thanks, I hadn't realized the Chron had done a podcast. I'm not sure why they did
it as a mov rather than an mp3.

[AF]

Kos wrote a diary on this.