I made good on my promise this weekend and barely touched the blog, let alone comment on politics of any stripe. This is despite being clearly called to the mat by RochesterTurning.com. (Thanks, BTP!) The results of my hiatus have been positive, and actually my one post of yesterday is probably some of my favourite writing in a while. But in my avoidance of politics I missed one of the few occasions when I find myself agreeing with an editorial in the D&C. Passionately agreeing, in fact:
An updated FOIA is vital, but so is Web accessibility || Democrat & Chronicle: Editorials
FOIA reform aside, one aspect of open government the federal government has addressed far more adroitly than local government is Web site completeness and ease of navigation.
Too many state and local sites are either difficult to navigate or overly political. The Monroe County site, for example, tends to focus County Executive Maggie Brooks’ activities. She’s running for re-election, not coincidentally.
Holy crap, yes! Finally, someone in the Rochester MSM decides to take Maggie to task for having spent god-only-knows how much to improve the MC website only for the sake of using it to promote herself. You can’t go anywhere on that site without either seeing her cherubic dip-shit smile or at least her name. All funded on the taxpayer’s dime, but I’ll betcha the commenting folks over there at the D&C have nothing to say about that, hey? In fact, no one’s posted a single comment on the subject.
But as long as we’re talking accessibility of information, I wonder what people’s thoughts are concerning the media’s obligation to provide information? I mean, one of the continual annoyances I face is bookmarking or linking to an article in a news website only to have it go away. Why is that? Storage can’t be a consideration, so then what is it? You can search this site for any post I’ve ever done and find it, but if you want an article more than a week old on the D&C, forget it.
Oh, sure, they’ve got an archive. But in this modern Internet, there’s a little thing called “permalinks,” which means that resources are identified permanently, even after they’ve long-since left the front page. I personally think that if news media outlets are our principle source of information on politicians, and politicians are answerable for their actions, then it follows that media sources need to take all possible steps to make sure the information we need is always available.
Technorati Tags: Maggie Brooks, Monroe County, Open Government
Powered by ScribeFire.
5 replies on “Maggie Brooks and Self-Promotion with Taxpayer Dollars”
[…] DragonFlyEye makes a good point about permalinks and the local media: I wonder what people’s thoughts are concerning the media’s obligation to provide information? I mean, one of the continual annoyances I face is bookmarking or linking to an article in a news website only to have it go away. Why is that? Storage can’t be a consideration, so then what is it? You can search this site for any post I’ve ever done and find it, but if you want an article more than a week old on the D&C, forget it. […]
[…] at RT picked up on my point in an earlier post about the need for permalinking and providing a repository of information on the web. Looking […]
[…] believe I missed this editorial in the D&C. Glad DFE didn’t, because he hits the nail on the head: FOIA reform aside, one aspect of open government the federal government has addressed far more […]
Hey man, I didn’t mean it to be a call to the mat. More a hug (a manly hug, of course) and a pep talk. I know a TON of people who were cheesed about the Iraq supplemental, rightly so. My wife was still going on about it, last night, more than a week after the fact.
But stuff I was hearing from folks was kind of like a “baby with the bathwater” kinda thing, which I understood but wanted to head off at the pass.
That said, everyone needed some kind of palate cleanser after last week. Mine just involved a few alcoholic beverages and some words like “heck” and “darn”. 🙂
LOL, yes, BTP, “Manly hug.”
Whatever you call it, I just meant that I was being called upon to come back out of the woods. Probably did me some good to sequester myself, though. The irony of blogging is that, while we try to make connections amongst the various and sundry news bits out there, eventually we get ourselves into the same trap that the MSM does. That trap, devised by many White Houses over the years and at it’s pinnacle now, of getting the media so bogged down in bullshit that we don’t see what’s really going on.