A Guy in LA

IF YOU CAUGHT this Connie Bruck profiler of Hizzoner in the New Yorker, you'd think that the LA blogosphere had no political importance in town. Worse, you'd think that the LATimes editorial page had some.

Well, don't look now, but even if the New Yorker doesn't know it yet, the local blogosphere figures are crashing other local media political gates.

Here are but a few recent examples: a guy well-known to the LA blogosphere, Daniel Guss, who sometimes comes off too passionate even for bloggers, nonetheless had a great op-ed in the Daily News last week on why the Zoo shouldn't keep elephants. The LATimes increasingly turns to bloggers for local issue opinions---just last Saturday, it was blogger/cyclist Will Campbell's bromide about the fauxness and fakery of LA's fickle commitment to bicycle lanes that tapped the local juices. Zuma here is always working some print piece. Sotto voce yours truly is on 35 this Friday and some other upcoming days, going toe to toe with Con Howe and illustrious others on affordable housing. Even K-Rod sipped power chardonnay with Ruth Seymour, and appears to have secured a slot Fridays that could enable him to teach those Friday SaMo winebibbers all about how important his blog is.

All this is, for bloggers of local issues, the third wave, not the first, not even the second. The first wave was from the local pols, especially City Councilpeople, who came around flattering bloggers and hoping for eternal buy-in. (They may get it from the voters, but they didn't get it from bloggers.) The next wave were the more savvy PR types, hip to the "long-tail" marketing concept and anxious to push product, especially if it involved entertainment.

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How the blogosphere shapes our politics is a question bloggers don't talk about much publically but do quite a bit of speculating about in email. A couple of years ago, I guessed that the blogosphere in aggregate could make a difference of between 2-5% whenever they mostly line up on one side of a given issue---not enough to make a king or queen, but just enough to be decisive in a close election. Now, of course, the influence is much larger, in part because the electorate itself is smaller and smaller. It appeared to many that bloggers defeated the last Measure H (Affordable Housing Bond) and the coming next one promises to be a bigger fight than the last.

But with the crossover into other media, when a blogger talks to a politician or media relations, it's now more important for the respondant to think about what else the blogger might be up to. And the fact that there is generally no editor to call when things are mis-stated or mis-interpreted, along with the fact that bloggers are generally writing neither straight news nor straight opinions but improvised fusions of both, make relationship and rapport with bloggers increasingly important for pols and their staff to master.

As bloggers learn as well. The No2HomeDepot effort in Sunland Tujunga has been mostly blog/email mobilized---it's been so effective that it appears HD itself is fighting back with a suspicious web presence of its own. CitywatchLA just gets better all the time; check these PLUM notes; very meaty, very important. I know I used to keep a special email list of LA citizens---now it's broken down by Council District.

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If the first wave of interest in bloggers were pols, the second PR, and the third other media, the fourth wave will be...moderate wampum. At LAist--where the blogosphere seems not a conduit to other media but an end unto itself--Tony Pierce has been quietly making hay. I know you don't read that blog much for local politics, but check LAist's ads: they're from real, honest to god, big-time corporations: AT&T, public television, Diageo. Ad-wise, the -ist group is putting lots of other blog groups to shame, and that includes the Defamer/Wonkette Dentonsphere.

Successful blogging: what a concept. The New Yorker doesn't know about it yet. But blogging hasn't come close to cresting. It's something for City Hall and City lobbyists and City stakeholders to think about, even while they're courting flacks and hacks who put them in publications that only are known for their disappointing profilers these days.