Less than two months away from the October 9th primary elections, only 11 of the 33 Greensboro City Council candidates have known web presence. (Tonya Clinkscale's website is here in case it hasn't been added to the News & Record's list.)
Six of those candidates do not have to worry about running in the primary; the two mayoral, two district 2, and two district 4 candidates will automatically advance since only two candidates are running for each of those offices. While they have an extra month of breathing room, three of those six candidates already have web presence, including both mayoral canidates.
But of the 27 candidates who face potential elimination in the primary, only 8 candidates currently have known web presence. That means the other 19 "primary" candidates currently are depending entirely on the local media to provide them any coverage. That means that there is no way for citizens to connect on-line with those candidates. It makes one wonder how serious those 19 candidates are. Several of them are unknowns or lesser-knowns for much of our city.
It also makes one wonder if the better-knowns take it for granted that they will advance and that they do not need to put forth the effort it takes to create some web presence for themselves. Some of the better-knowns who are trying to make a come-back in local politics should know better than to take anything for granted. But at least as of now, it seems many of our city council candidates are taking their time with their campaigns, failing to realize that precious time's flying by. And that they might be wasting it.
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5 comments:
That many candidates are failing to utilize a medium they can control is but one aspect of the lack of web presence. The other, most important to me, is willingness for candidates to use this medium engage the public with give-and-take discussion -- to keep us up to date on their activities in their own words and to allow us to comment. By that measure, even most of the candidates with a web presence are failing.
Does anyone have any information about how many local voters have internet access, and how many get local news and information from internet sources?
Having this information available may be critical for getting out the vote efforts for candidates.
Roch,
It amazes me too that hardly any candidates are using a regularly updated blog to try to connect with more voters. You'd think that in the course of a serious campaign, you'd make time for such an effort, particularly if it had a chance of giving you an edge over other candidates. The opportunity is there, just waiting for more people to take advantage of it. Just taking note of how few candidates have any form of web presence is depressing.
I hope some candidates are at least going door-to-door. On a blog, they could even share such experiences though and reach even more people. At this point, I still don't think it's too late for a blog-effort to make a positive difference.
Sincerely,
Hardy
Bubba,
I don't have that information. It's an interesting question. I would guess that a respectable number of people have internet access. I would guess that a smaller percentage than that use internet sources to get local news and information. It just seems that more candidates would at least include the web as part of their campaign strategy--it's bound to reach more people than you would without it.
Sincerely,
Hardy
Good question, Bubba. And hard to answer precisely, especially since you want to measure voters who have internet access and not just the general population.
This won't answer the question completely, but here are some stats that might shed some light.
In 2002, 57% of adults in the southeast had internet access. (That number having grown 20% over the previous two years, I'd estimate it to be about 75% in the region today. As a metro area, I'd bump that up more for Greensboro and estimate 80 to 85%).
(http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Regional_Report_Aug_2003.pdf)
In 2005, 27% of internet users said they read blogs. (At that time, only 38% of internet users knew what a blog was.)
(http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_blogging_data.pdf)
The most important known statistic about Greensboro blog readers is that about 50,000 unique readers read Greensboro blogs each month. 25,000 unique individuals visited the Greensboro Blog Page of We101 last month.
My educated guess is that 12,000 - 18,000 likely Greensboro municipal voters read local blogs each month.
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