The Wardman Wire

I’m quite interested in the way the tectonic plates in the political blogosphere are shifting anyway in advance of the General Election.

Two of our regular (and superb) contributors, Mark Pack and Rev David Keen, are standing down from writing for the Wardman Wire regularly – so it looks as if we’re due for a refocussing here.

Several of the left group blogs (Lab List, Lib Con and Left Foot Forward) seem to be increasingly trying to crowd onto the same small piece of anti-Tory ground. Someone may fall off, but expect significant repositionings after the Election, whatever the result.

Meanwhile on the right there seems to be a hole where a non-party-aligned policy-type group blog needs to be. That won’t be us, because we have quite a balanced left / right / centre / nonaligned set of contributors, and various specialists.

My tip: if Sunder Katwala managed to turn the Next Left blog into a full group blog (with a design that let us see more articles without scrolling 28 feet down) while maintaining its current level of editorial consistency, he could achieve something quite significant.

There’s a landscape-defining space available on left and right, and in the centre, for blog websites which can consistently achieve FT levels of authority.

Combine that with a sufficiently large team to do some political news coverage, and plenty of people won’t care that the silly newspapers have slunk behind their paywalls.

Add in multiple versions of Slugger starting up soon, and interesting times lie ahead.