As everyone who reads this site undoubtedly knows, a few weeks ago a few of my ‘friends’ on the left-wing side of the political spectrum launched their new website, the California Majority Report. .jpg)
Actually, I spoke on several occasions with the Democrat activists who were putting this site together, giving them some general input on a collegial level. They invited me to come up to Sacramento last month to their big, glitzy "launch party" which was attended by a couple hundred members of the Sacramento liberal elite, including many socialist-policy-embracing officeholders like State Senate President Don Perata, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and many others. This group was so left-wing that former Gray Davis/Steve Westly advisor Garry South stuck out as the reasonable one of the bunch.
One cannot help but try to make a comparison between this new website and the FlashReport. In doing so, one wants to try to compare our blog page to the main page of the CMR, where their various contributors have featured columns. In trying to do this, it becomes painfully obvious that our Democrat friends have a huge hurdle to jump if they want to create a dynamic blog site — their own liberal ideology!
Republicans believe in certain basic principles that give us a natural edge in the creation of a great blog site — we believe in decentralization, local control, and individual responsibility. These principles manifest themselves in the fact that we have twenty different bloggers on the site, each of whom directly post their own material to the website. None of this content is reviewed by me, or Managing Editor Nick Romero, before it goes up, and in almost a year online, we have had nearly 2000 unique posts made, and I can only recall one instance where I asked the blogger to pull it down, and that was only because it had no nexus to California politics — and I gave them the choice. I guess another way to say it is that when I log onto the FlashReport – I never know what I am going to be reading, even though I am the publisher!
This kind of decentralization has been achieved because we here at the FR went out and found as contributors people that we know are responsible, and will step up to post items that will be interesting, provocative and pertinent. We often times have differences of opinion among our own contributors, and that is healthy, too.
Now take the blue team over at the California Majority Report — it is very clear that there is not a lot dynamic energy taking place over there. Content on their site is controlled by the editors, and it is they who post things onto the page. So the contributors to the site have to write something up, and send it in to the "collective" for review and processing. This, of course, is the natural ‘comfort zone’ for liberals, who believe that something run through a centralized process is the best way to go. (pictured to above to the right, CMR Publisher Jason Kinney programs Gale Kaufman as part of the Borg, trained to sumbit her posts to the collective for processing).
But I would humbly suggest that my Democrat colleagues at the CMR try wading into the waters of individual liberty and freedom. You might find it makes for a better website. Then again, you might scare away some of your best contributors, who prefer top-down authoritarianism.
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