François Bayrou, a presidential candidate for UDF in the elections to be held here in France next year was welcomed to the stage with some delegates yelling out their displeasure at a political candidate interrupting the advertised program. I was inclined to agree but he soon won me over. Here was a candidate saying that mainstream media is not taking much notice of him and that blogs offered to drive democracy through greater transparency. He cited the Howard Dean campaign for US President in 2004. Maybe he should connect with Joe Trippi – the architect of the Dean online campaign. Of course at a bloggers conference this was what we wanted to hear – that blogs matter, that they are essential to democracy and that the filtering by some mainstream media organisations of news and opinion is unhealthy. The detractors seemed happy by the end of Bayrou’s conversation.
In this an other presentation I am asking myself: where are newsagents in this? Nowhere, not in the online world or the blogosphere. The world is in the middle of huge change in how we access and share information. Newsagents used to be at the hub of that. They (we) need to find a new traffic generator hub.