My friend Hop

A lot of the post-election buzz has been about Hop’s final ad paid for by the “Committee not to elect Hop.” As first reported in this blog, Hop paid for the ad himself, which did not surprise me, but apparently a lot of people did not realize it was a parody. I know this because it came up quite a bit in my last week of campaigning.

Livinston County News editor Mark Gillespie devoted his editorial this week to a stirring defense of freedom of the press and said he would do it again. Of course the Pennysaver ran the same ad, but nobody expects very high journalistic standards from them.

As a former newspaper publisher, I have been asked my opinion. I would like to think that I might have hesitated to run a political ad that had the potential to be deceptive the week before an important election, but I’m not sure. Business is business, and not being as politically correct as some, I might not have even realized it was offensive.

On the other hand, I never took the same liberal position on printing letters to the editor that the News does. I would print any kind of opinion, but I did not allow letters to report “facts” that I knew to be untrue. In fact, the News did run many unedited letters over the years that I either rejected for publication or required edits on.

I apply those same rules to moderating my blogs. For instance, recently our Florida correspondent Greg Lamb wrote a comment claiming that Bill Lofquist was wrong in asserting that there was no site plan for the Newman project on file in the town office. His source for that was Newman attorney Ken Kamlet’s quoted in the LC News. I wrote back to Greg and told him that I was not going to allow him to spread Mr. Kamlet’s disinformation on my blog. Of course, I could have posted the comment and then refuted it, but why give something that is obviously untrue any credibility at all?

Getting back to Hop, I doubt that the ad flap made a difference in the outcome of the election. He finished almost 150 votes ahead of Patti Lavigne, and if some people did vote for him out of sympathy for being attacked, not all of those voters would have had Patti as a second choice.

I believe Hop (and David) won because of their personal popularity. They are both Teflon candidates who managed to survive even though they ran as part of a team whose leader and policies were wildly unpopular.

A note about this blog: Now that the election is over, I will keep this blog open for election items until the final canvass of votes is made next week. Yesterday was the second day in a row to set a record in traffic with over 200 readers and the blog has been read over 5,000 times since I started in May. Thanks for reading and especially to those who commented.

I will continue to write my weekly column (maybe a few days late this week because I am working on my DEIS comments) and publish my news blog (which also had a record day yesterday and where some interesting post-election comments have been posted). Both can be found at www.clarioncall.com.

Hear the Clarion Call!

Finally, after six months of blogging, we’re seeing a real debate break out around a blog. And who would have thought it would be my little Clarion Call weekly column blog that would catch fire? Yesterday I set a new record for traffic to that blog, and as of this morning we have 8 comments posted under this week’s column. (O.K., three of those are mine, but there are four others who have ventured to add their thoughts!)

This is what I hoped would happen when I ventured into the blogosphere last March, but it has been very slow to get started. The pressure of the upcoming election and the impending public hearing, however, has shown the value of a blog as a place to vent and express your opinions.

Of course, that still leaves a huge number of you lurking in the background without expressing your thoughts. All my web statistics tell me there are hundreds of you out there reading these blogs on a regular basis, but there are probably no more than a dozen that have ever posted a comment on any of the four blogs.

As Mr. Lamb and Kurt Cylke have proven, I don’t censor comments just because I may not agree with them or they are critical of me. As moderator, I have decided to be as liberal as possible in allowing comments, although I sometimes will not post a comment that is simply repetitive of something the same person has already said.

There’s really no excuse not to get involved since I also allow anonymous comments, although I do reserve the right to trace your electronic footprint and hunt you down like a dog!

P.S. Some of the increase in traffic to this blog (which also set a new record yesterday) can be traced to a nice letter about my campaign web site from Jean Lindsay that was published in the LC News this week. Thanks Jean! The letter is also posted on my campaign site here.

Now I remember!

It was over 20 years ago that I engaged in my first political campaign, a 1986 Republican primary for NYS Assembly in the then 136th AD. I was totally green politically, having never been involved with Livingston County politics at all.

One of the things I learned from that experience is that, the closer you are to a news story, the more inaccurate you realize the reporting of that story is. It was that revelation that inspired me to go into the newspaper business a few years later, and continues to drive me to report the news here and on my  Clarion News Blog.

The latest example of the media’s tendency to screw things up, is my former employee, Howard’s Appell’s report in this week’s LC News about Monday’s Geneseo Planning Board meeting. (See today’s Clarion News Blog for details)

While Howard’s allegation that I interrupted a routine subdivison discussion is totally untrue and potentially very damaging, I have one advantage that no other person who is the subject of an inaccurate news story has. I can post an immediate correction on my web site that will be seen by many people before they even see the actual offending piece.

How many? In the month of August we had almost 3,000 visitors to our news blog. That’s over  700 a week, or about 100 a day. While surely some people visit more than once a week, that is still a fairly substantial number of readers, so it is a fair bet that every blog item is seen by hundreds of people.

That’s a pretty good start on righting the wrong done me by Howard’s sloppy reporting, but it won’t reach everybody. So if you hear someone say, “Did you hear how Corrin barged in and interrupted the planning board while they were discussing a subdivision…” please set them straight!

Friends

Sorry, I’m a little late with this column this morning, but my new fascination with Facebook has soaked up a lot of time. Since starting my Facebook page on Monday night, I now have a total of 9 official friends. O.K., three of them are my own children (Celia where are you?), but that’s not a bad start!

The way Facebook works is that you generally have to be accepted as someone’s friend before you can see their profile (and they can see yours). This is all very new to me, so I may have this wrong.

The rest of my “friends” are either current members who accepted my offer of friendship, or new members who joined after I sent a spam out yesterday to 195 people in my address book. Among the new members are Kathleen Houston and John Zmich. Welcome aboard!

If you know these people, (and who in Geneseo doesn’t?) I’m sure you could be their friend too! But a word about friendship and politics. Being my friend (on Facebook or in the real world) does not mean you have to be my political supporter. And vice-versa, Thank God!

In other words, you do not have to be my friend, you don’t even have to like me (although it helps), to vote for me. You just have to think that I will do the best job of any of the available candidates. On the other hand, you can think I’m the greatest person in the history of the world (and want to be my friend), and still not think that I’m the right person to be Geneseo Supervisor in 2008!

I understand this, because I learned a long time ago that politics is not personal. So lighten up, have some fun and get your own face on Facebook.com! And then you can decide if you want to be my friend (and I hope the answer will be yes!)

P.S. Speaking of friends, it was nice to see County Administrator Nick Mazza strolling on Main Street yesterday. He seemed to be well-received by the locals, so much so that he was late getting back to his car and found a parking ticket on it. Being the true mensch that Nick is, he marched right in to the Village Hall and paid the ticket on the spot. It’s good to see a thaw in County-Village relations! Thanks Nick! Come back soon!

See my face on Facebook

After reading a story in Newsweek about how Facebook is taking over the world, I decided to try to catch up with this social networking web site. Actually I’ve had an account for a while, but that was inspired solely by a desire to check out who my children’s friends are. Now I want to see what Facebook can do for me and my campaign.

In case you don’t know, www.facebook.com was started as a way for students at the same college to meet and get to know each other faster. For a long time, you had to have a college-based e-mail address to sign up. Recently, however, the service opened the doors to anybody and non-college students are now the majority of new members, although the overall demographic still skews fairly young. (By the way the service is absolutely free.)

As an example, when I had Facebook check out the 195 e-mail addresses in my contact list, it only found 14 current members of Facebook, and most of those were either college students or staff. Still I sent a spam blast out to all of those people inviting them to join, so that may increase. (Most of the names were e-mail addresses I gathered over the summer of local Republicans, so that is probably not an accurate measure of Facebook’s overall market penetration.)

I’m a newbie at this, of course, so don’t expect great things from my site, but if you are a member I would be happy to be your friend! A candidate needs all the friends he can get! If you are a member, you can check out my face here!