NY Times Says My Life Has No Purpose

The New York Times published an article yesterday with the headline, “The Web, Despite Its Promise, Fails to Snare Iowa Voters.” In it, the TImes found Iowans who said they have never read a blog. And then they quoted Joe Trippi, who admitted that Iowans don’t use as many of the Edwards campaign’s cool Web 2.0 gizmos as voters in other states.

As perhaps the only paid, full-time blogger in the state (which is not to say that I am the best blogger, or the only paid blogger, because I’m neither), one might expect the Times piece to offend me. But the thing is, it’s true: Iowans are strikingly less web-savvy than residents of many other states, and it’s a challenge bloggers here face.

Sure, I could quibble with the Times reporter’s methodology: she collected the bulk of her string at the Johnson County Democrats’ barbecue last weekend, and she could have easily cherry-picked the subjects of her interview. Had she been watching while Iowa Independent Fellow and blogger John Deeth was invited up on stage at that event to receive an activist award, she may have realized that bloggers do exist here. And she relied on a survey from May that was conducted by a print publication to prove that most caucus goers rely on traditional media for news without raising any questions about what the print publication’s motives may have been (and whether they planned to use those results in their advertising material). She also failed to mention anything about one blog in particular that was only launched last May, but which has grown quite a bit in Iowa since then. But I think the gist of her article is still right, so I can get past all that.

Really. I can. Because I know the right people in media are reading blogs at least occasionally, and I know that more and more Iowans use the internet every day.

One funny fact that I’ll share with you about Iowa Independent’s traffic: Of the 77,000 unique visits we got between August 1 and September 30, only about 13,000 came from Iowa. We got linked by non-Iowa blogs significantly more often than we got linked by Iowa blogs. In a certain sense, our impact on the national media coverage of the Presidential race is greater than our impact on local media coverage of it. It is strange, but slowly it’s changing.