Seattle Times article about blogs

Sound Politics and I are mentioned in today's front-page Seattle Times article about blogs: "Web logs catch fire as kindling for change"

From his cyber pulpit, the Shark Blog, Stefan Sharkansky rips into local education levies and the monorail, among other diatribes against liberal media, John Kerry, Michael Moore and Yasser Arafat, to name a few.

He has gone so far as to compare King County Executive Ron Sims to Zimbabwe's dictatorial President Robert Mugabe, a comparison that even one regular reader said crossed the line.

Sharkansky, dubbed by another blogger as "the local political blogfather," has been operating the Shark Blog from his Green Lake home since May 2003, when he moved from San Francisco.

"I find that I'm having the most influence per time spent talking about local issues," said Sharkansky, 41, a software consultant. "There are so many people writing well on national issues. On the local issues, we really need to have alternative voices to what I call Seattle's political monoculture."

His audience is still tiny — on Friday his site meter registered an average of 1,100 visits a day, most of them staying less than a minute. By comparison, the influential blog Instapundit recently averaged 300,000 visitors a day.

But Sharkansky credits his blog for helping him throw his voice into the debate on such local issues as charter schools and programs funded by Seattle's Family and Education Levy.

In July, Sharkansky and five other local bloggers launched a site called Sound Politics to comment on current events in the city, region and state.

I like the "local political blogfather" quote. (That was from Jacqueline Passey, who was also profiled in the article). I've been a snarky critic of the Seattle Times (and justifiably so, I think), so I wouldn't necessarily expect a glowing endorsement, which this profile of me isn't. At least it helps illustrate the pervasiveness of Seattle's monoculture of political discourse and why alternative voices are needed. For example:

From his cyber pulpit, the Shark Blog, Stefan Sharkansky rips into local education levies and the monorail

I'll grant that I rip into the monorail. But I'm disappointed with this characterization of my commentary on education levies. Here in Seattle, education levies routinely appear on the ballot and pass without much debate. The local monoculture of opinion dictates that one must reflexively support these things or be labeled as anti-tax, anti-education or whatever. The result is there is no constructive public oversight, leading to poorly designed, unaccountable and ultimately wasteful and ineffective programs. I've been one of the very few to offer constructive criticism of some of these things, calling for more transparency, accountability and effectiveness. A number of folks, including people campaigning for these levies and editorial writers from both daily newspapers have praised me (mostly in private) for raising the bar on the discussion and ultimately on the expectations voters have of these programs. To denigrate my contributions to the public debate as "rip into" seems only to delegitimize constructive opposition.

He has gone so far as to compare King County Executive Ron Sims to Zimbabwe's dictatorial President Robert Mugabe, a comparison that even one regular reader said crossed the line.

Here's an entry comparing Ron Sims with Mugabe. Clearly it's mostly tongue-in-cheek. But a lot of people have real concerns about Ron Sims frequently ham-handed behavior, which leans authoritarian even more than other contemporary big city machine bosses. In the cited example, Sims crossed a few lines himself in implying that Tim Eyman should be thrown in jail solely on account of his lawful campaigns against status quo government. It would have been helpful to put my comments about Sims in their proper context.

The article includes URLs for the Shark Blog and Sound Politics. The online version contains actual links. Oddly, there is no link to Instapundit, who is mentioned in the article, but there is a link to Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, which is not mentioned in the article.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at September 22, 2004 10:37 AM | Email This