The Wardman Wire

Labour List officially launches tomorrow. I thought it was worth a look at how they are getting on, in response to an interesting conversation sparked off by Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy about Derek Draper and Labour List:

Note too, that yesterday Huffington Post made history by being the first blog allowed to a Presidential press conference.

What to make of all this? Well, quite a few thoughts come to mind and I’m going to try and keep this as constructive as possible, because though their efforts so far are abysmal, it’s a good thing in my view that the upper hierarchy is trying to engage online.

Let’s start with Labour List. Derek Draper’s past indiscretions aside, my main problem here is that all the top names seem to see it as a medium to publish bland rubbish that sounds similar to a press release. It’s boring and lame, and will end up like the far more abysmal Tory effort: The Blue Blog. Hell, that’s so bad even Iain Dale doesn’t plug it anymore.

Draper has given it personality by ringing up people and picking fights with them but that’s only going to work for so long. The point is: if your top bloggers (cabinet ministers) are only going to write boring comment pieces without seeing what others are saying of Labour policies and responding to them, then it’s a waste of space. If we wanted press releases we can go to Labour.org.uk. And this obsession with Iain Dale isn’t likely to win many vote converts is it?

The other problem is that Derek Draper seems to think all this is going to become a mainstream activity, and he’s blogging for 60 million people not 60 bloggers. I’m afraid that’s being hilariously optimistic. Blogging will always be a niche activity, albeit an activity that has the potential to involve the brightest and most committed of political people. But it’s certainly not going to involve the entire electorate.

If Labour apparatchiks think online activities themselves will help them win the election then they’re deluded. Obama didn’t use the internet to win, he used the internet to galvanise and organise the most committed so they could reach out to everyone else. It’s a means to an end, not an end to itself.

And I demonstrate that by using this diagram that illustrates Obama’s reach (h/t The Next Right)

My Comments

Firstly, I think that that graph does not measure “engagement”, it measures “contact”. I am a “member” of Avaaz.org, and that membership amounts to receiving occasional emails telling me what to do. If “engagement” is to be reduced to this, then politics will have been debased. “Politics 2.0″ won’t arrive because political marketeers get better at email targetting; that is why I’m ploughing the “Conversational Politics” furrow.

On Labour List, my current thoughts are below the fold.

I think I see these aspects to Labour List several weeks in, and I’ve added a couple of personal reflections:

* An attempt at an internal party bully pulpit for the leadership – and so about re-establishing comms channels that have corroded. By bully pulpit I mean a platform to advocate the “leadership” line inside the party.

* A move to get less formal communication from the leadership. That is positive if they write their own pieces; I don’t know how many do so.

* A revisiting of the old pre-buttal approach – i.e., pre-emptive Tory bashing. For me this is the site’s worst feature, although there is a little more analysis creeping in.

* An attempt to put over a particular historical narrative that may or may not reflect the facts. On about day 2 of the site I pointed out that one of the Labour List articles was airbrushing history, both on my site (twice) and in their comments (they need comment permalinks). The substantive point that the historical record was being traduced never received a response.

I’m prepared to put that down to ignorance or “believing propaganda” rather than outright lying on Sarah Mulholland’s part, but uncorrected assertions flying in the face of the evidence will come back to bite their bottom, as George Monbiot demonstrated to Hazel Blears yesterday.

* I do not see dialogue. Maybe that’s a “yet”.

* A place to explore the leadership opinions in more detail than is done in press releases.

* An attempt to affect the channels that feed in to Sunny’s beloved “media narratives” as step one. From that angle, plan B for Labourlist – which will never be admitted – is about building a position to have an impact in opposition just in case (!) they lose the next election.

* I don’t think the Labour leadership isn’t really interested in dialogue, and have never been, except as part of the presentation. That won’t stand up in blog-land.

* I wonder whether they have shifted from “communicating with 60 million” to “communicating with 60,000 party members and media”. The “60 million” would be a 5 year project and any blog strategy could only be a facilitator until such time as blogs develop a mass-readership in the UK. That is beginning to happen with some media blogs, but not for the independent commentators yet.

My measure of “mass readership” would be blogs reaching 2-5% of the population each month. For a comparison, the Huffington Post currently reaches around 3-4% of the population in the USA, and it is basically a tabloid site. This is not an easy goal to reach; in the UK the numbers need to be 500k->2.5 million monthly uniques. Even Guido is perhaps only 20-25% of the way to the lower bound.

* I think that the most effective Tory response might be “stick to the knitting” and watch Labour List run into the sand, if they think that will happen. Success depends on Labour building a unified internal coalition, and which tradition gets the upper hand in that coalition.

* Labour List has published just over 120 posts in its first month from a lot of different people. Group blogs usually have up to 3/4 of contributors go quiet without very active editing, i.e., asking people to contribute specific articles. Watch Labour List either side of the summer hiatus.

The dynamics may be different for a semi-official site: that depends on how the relationships are set up and whether party leaders are under presure to contribute.

Is Labour List actually an “informal” part of the official media strategy? I think it probably is, to coin a phrase, “officially semi-official”.

Wrapping Up

I’m all commented-out, but please do let me know what you think.