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So it’s come to this: Pittsburgh’s finest local-politics blog, The Burgh Report, has gone dark. As you’d expect, there’s been some online gnashing of teeth. But whereas the departure of PittGirl attracted a front-page story in the Post-Gazette, and Teacher.Wordsmith.Madman author Chad Hermann got a full-page op-ed piece to explain his departure, the Burgh Report merely received an online-only write-up. Apparently, it doesn’t even warrant a mention in this week’s “Cutting Edge,” the P-G‘s wrap-up of internet gleanings. (Though in fairness to the P-G, news of the BR’s demise may have reached the paper after its Sunday op-ed section was already laid out.)
So I guess it’s my turn to be the paid journalist who makes a big deal out of a blog shutting down. Which is fine by me, because I think this one really does matter.
Let me say right off that I don’t see any great conspiracy here. I have a pretty good guess about who The Burgher is, and what I know about that person’s life circumstances makes shutting down the blog a totally natural thing to do. (You can find The Burgher’s own explanation here.) Those looking for the Hand of Zober in this are probably wasting their time.
Even so, this is a blow. When previous blogs shut down, I was in the camp of those who said, “For every blog that goes dark, 10 more will arise in their place.” Now, I’m not so sure.
For a time, it was easy to believe (or at least hope) that Internet technology would be a new machine, one that could effectively contest with the mid-20th century technology of Pittsburgh’s party-machine politics. And it would be nice to think that progressive voices on the internet were self-replenishing — the way that, say, Democrat-endorsed candidates for City Council District 2 are. But not so.
As corroded as its cogs and gears may be, the Democratic machine in town doesn’t ask a lot of its constituent parts. Almost anyone could fill in for outgoing councilor Dan Deasy — who heads off to Harrisburg without having made an impression on anyone or anything. Any flunky or hack will do.
But it isn’t that easy for the rest of us. When you don’t have access to power, you need numbers and smarts. And the Burgh Report, along with a couple other blogs going silent, is a case where we’ve lost the latter especially.
In post after post, the Burgher demonstrated an obvious knowledge both of law and the inner workings of government. You’re not going to find that many people who bring such expertise to bear — and who want to share it with the rest of us so openly (albeit under cover of anonymity). It would be equally difficult to imagine someone replacing, say, Chris Briem at Null Space. How many people can write knowledgeably about bond issues, in a way that makes you want to read about them? If the Pittsburgh Comet were to stop posting on those interminable city council meetings, how many people out there would bring Bram Reichbaum’s zeal (or flexible work schedule) to the task?
It’s worth remembering that Pittsburgh’s original political blog, the notorious Grant Street 99, started in 1999 and went dark after legal action against its anonymous author commenced. It was years before any site rose up to replace it.
I don’t think it will take that long to replace the Burgh Report: Blogging is a much bigger part of the discourse than it was in the late 1990s. But I do think we may be witnessing a sea-change here.
Perhaps we simply got spoiled by an initial spate of bloggers who, under cover of anonymity, were willing to make use of obvious gifts that they were ALSO using in their day jobs. Something was bound to give: Either the threat of losing that anonymity, or the more mundane demands of their working lives, was bound to intrude.
And now, perhaps, it’s up to the rest of us.
The mythos of blogging is that it is a “crowdsourced” phenomenon, in which a whole bunch of independent voices at some point swell into a thunderous consent, and drown out the chorus of doubters and hacks. But so far, it hasn’t played out that way. Instead, we’ve ended up with a handful of blogs that a crowd of readers rely on. Even now, internet hopes have turned toward the Comet, with Bram Reichbaum playing the part of the Ringbearer, carrying progressive hopes into the depths of Mordor. Which is a hell of a burden to put on Bram.
This is the mirror image, really, of the local progressive approach to politics. We don’t seem to have a ton of numbers behind us, and despite our best efforts, we don’t seem to be building the massive grassroots progressive campaign that will allow us to storm the halls of power en masse. So instead, we go looking for the Great Hope — Bill Peduto? Chelsa Wagner? — who will slay the Democratic Goliath with a sling fashioned from $25 Paypal contributions. Yet the champion departs the field, in large part because there aren’t enough of us behind him or her.
There’s a chicken-and-egg thing going on here: Do we not have the right champion because there aren’t enough of us, or are there not enough of us because we don’t have the right champion? Barack Obama seems to have resolved the conundrum on the national level, but I don’t think anyone knows how to pull it off here.
In any event, my prediction is that there won’t be another Burgh Report. But this may actually be a good thing. What could happen is the rise of a chorus of voices — perhaps none bringing the singular expertise The Burgher had, but perhaps not constrained by anonymity either. Perhaps those voices will prove more robust, and the debate they spawn will be more robust as well.
If that doesn’t happen, well … maybe that little itch should be telling us something. If we can’t even maintain a decent stable of blogs, it’s hard to imagine how anything is going to get done offline either. Just as you can’t run anonymous candidates for office, you can’t rely on an online movement to effect real political change.
This article appears in Dec 18-24, 2008.
“Barack Obama seems to have resolved the conundrum on the national level, but I don’t think anyone knows how to pull it off here.”
As several of us, including yourself, have pointed out, Obama provided the blueprint for defeating “the machine” in a citywide race when he defeated Hillary Clinton in the city during the Democratic primary. It won’t be easy due to the mayor’s huge funding advantage, but now it is a matter of who is up to the challenge, not how they achieve victory Oh, and as we found out last fall, they have to be a Democrat in order to win (sorry Kevin Acklin).
I think you are on to something with the “rise of a chorus of voices.” Now that the burgh report is gone, what are all of those anonymous commenters going to do? Some are starting to hit up The Pittsburgh Comet and some the other political blogs here in town. I have noticed some new political blogs starting up over the last few weeks and I have heard news of some offline initiatives that are underway in the wake of the burgh report’s demise. Like you said – it may actually turn out to be a good thing.
Yes, I’ve expressed the hope that we could replicate the Obama coalition of progressives, African-American voters, and people just sick to death of the same-old. That said, a local candidate would face challenges in Pittsburgh that Obama did not. Obama came into town with the kind of name recognition and starpower that, say, Carmen Robinson can only dream about.
Anyway, I guess what I had in mind with the Obama comparison was something a little different. Obama really DID fuse internet advocacy with a disgruntled “progressive base” … and in Obama those two movements found their champion. It was a kind of synergy which, I guess, happens in any history-making campaign. But my point was that I’m not sure that kind of thing can be engineered intentionally. It’s some sort of serendipitous thing in which the movement and the leader find, and then shape, each other.
I agree the sudden rise of a handful of other blogs is a hopeful sign. (In addition to one of the sites linked above, I’ll cite http://thehuddler.blogspot.com and http://www.pghpolemics.com, both links courtesy of the Comet.) Let’s hope the momentum can sustain itself.
The thing about Barack Obama is that he still has not done anything as President, but people have cooed about his cabinet choices (except when they haven’t, such as appointing no LGBT high level secretaries and such) or complained about moves he has made (Rick Warren). Yet about a year ago the nomination was Hillary Clinton’s to lose, Obama was barely on people’s radar. There is a way that Carmen Robinson could approach the race, trying to get the best people in Pittsburgh onto a team. The two names that come to my mind are Paul O’Neill and Larry Davis of Pitt’s School of Social Work. If she could bring them in as visible advisors, she might be able to court the progressive vote and the African American vote. She should also come out very, very soon with an economic proposal. It can be something as simple as saying that she supports a second Act 47 five year plan that will deal with our debt and under-funded pensions. This would make automatically more serious and more adult than our current Mayor. She should try to get some few hundred Republicans to write her name in on that side as well. That way she could still run in November, after having laid all this ground work (and she would presumably get the Republican vote, especially if she talked about running with the party of Lincoln). She is certainly a long shot. But if she starts working with some political professionals now, if she can do a good debate (with lots of content), she might have shot.
The problem with using the “Obama coalition” as a blueprint for anything is that it was premised on having an Obama to lead it. If there was anything “serendipitous” about it, it was the emergence of a brick shit house of a candidate that could push the right buttons on both sides of the equation without alienating either.
The local African-American communities and the white progressive communities don’t get along nearly as well as, say, the blogging community would prefer it (notwithstanding the exceptional nuptials that prove the rule). Frankly, in Pittsburgh, I think we stand a better shot if one candidate really seizes the AA vote and another one takes the Prog vote, and then maybe one of those gets a leg up on geographical terms or whatever. Which is stubbornly seeming both more and less likely every day.
“If there was anything ‘serendipitous’ about it, it was the emergence of a brick shit house of a candidate that could push the right buttons on both sides of the equation without alienating either.”
>>>> Clearly Obama was sui generis as political candidates go. But I don’t think that’s the end of the story. Let’s remember how badly outgunned he was in the early going — how all the money and endorsements and everything else seemed to be lining up for Clinton this time two years ago. Obama ran an incredibly smart campaign, of course, but there was also a whole infrastructure in place by that point — a fundraising and informational apparatus that Dean pioneered but that really came into its own just as Obama was taking center stage. That helped blunt Clinton’s edge in all the traditional metrics.
Where would the Obama campaign have been without all that money, which allowed him to contest the commercial media on its own ground — by buying hugely expensive infomercials and ads?
Any campaign — any historical event — is the combination of a thousand different factors. (Would the outcome have changed if the economy hadn’t started tanking so badly, if John McCain’s campaign hadn’t been so inept, etc. …) Obama’s starpower is no doubt part of the equation, but not all of it.