Here’s the format I will be using for live-blogging tonight’s Common Council meeting. I’m interested in using live-blogging to produce commentary more quickly. (My comments will remain after the meeting for later viewing.)
Additional remarks — 🙂
1. It’s a good idea for someone to express displeasure with boisterous or ornery members of the gallery. After all, each medium — live, radio, television, print — has its own standards of enough or too much. It’s worth pointing that out.
2. Although print has room for lots of fiery rhetoric, in-person conversations (and videotaped ones) require a cool delivery. That means tone has to be kept level. There’s a point in the discussion where the city manager seems really irritated with how someone described a supposed promise. There’s irritated and there’s seems irritated — and seems irritated is almost always a mistake on television.
Beyond that, a good politics has no end – it’s an ongoing process, with no fixed result. A new day begins, and new issues arise – it’s not winning or losing, but bringing one’s convictions to the events of each new day, and testing them against what one finds. A person may be privately irritated, but there’s no room for anything publicly except the next issue, the next set of facts, the next analysis, and the next advocacy.
It’s a commitment to forging ahead unfazed to that next day, to starting over again in the morning, that makes a great difference.
I’ll write about that tomorrow, in a post entitled, The Talented Dr. Hayne.