7 Comments

• Guido Fawkes 21st Apr '07 - 7:20am

  Well if you asked me nicely… obviously I’d make a few changes, you know, more humour, pictures etc.

  Seriously, I think the behind-the-registration-wall private discussion board is a mistake.

  Also needs more newsy stuff, on ConservativeHome you find out things you don’t see elsewhere. That is not the case here.

• Rob Fenwick 21st Apr '07 - 11:16am

  I’m sure the discussion board is a mistake if you’re someone who isn’t a Lib Dem, but this site isn’t here to provide theatre for people of other parties / no party 🙂

  I take your point on the news thing though, and will attempt to answer that fully:

  1) I tread cautiously breaking things in public these days because the people who reacted strongest against my doing so in the early days were my target audience – grassroots Lib Dem members.

  However, there was a slightly crazy position recently where the people who talked to me about our mayoral selection swore me to secrecy, which basically meant I couldn’t run anything until someone like Iain Dale broke it first, which was frustrating. I’m sure someone of a more journalistic bent would’ve found a way to get around being sworn to secrecy.

  2) LDV has difficulty doing things like covering selections to the extent that ConHome does, which is their bread & butter to some extent – our party’s rules mean that in many cases if I name a candidate standing for a selection they could be expelled from the race.

  3) The Lib Dem blogosphere has for years now been much broader and healthier than the blogosphere of other parties – those bloggers don’t want an upstart coming in and being first with everything. Again, in the early days there was a thirst to be first on LDV, and there were numerous complaints. Again, a more ambitious person might have trampled over that and marched to the top of the hill, but I personally just don’t see the need to do that.

  The strength of the LD blogosphere also takes talented people away from this arena – why blog for, and comment on, LDV when you can blog and comment on your own blog?

  4) Perhaps more important than all the above – LDV isn’t ConHome. The audience here don’t want that, and I wouldn’t have the time to provide it even if they did!

• Laurence Boyce 21st Apr '07 - 12:13pm

  I agree with Guido. I find forums pretty pointless. The Blog format is just so much better. If you’ve got something worth saying, then say it out loud. By the way Rob, have you had a chance to read the article I emailed you?

• Rob Fenwick 21st Apr '07 - 12:15pm

  I floated the idea of closing the forum to the community in there a while ago, it was completely rejected.

  Just reading your article now Laurence.

• Jeremy Hargreaves 21st Apr '07 - 4:56pm

  Actually I do find out about quite a few stories from this site first – stories which are not big enough to make mainstream news but are of interest to people in the party. Guido’s comment that LDV doesn’t score highly on breaking news first may well be true for “professional” political bloggers who read a lot of political blogs, but for party members who just look at a blog or two, I find this very useful.

  And Rob’s quite right – there is plenty of discussion on the forum which is quite interesting and just wouldn’t get said in public. I can see why this frustrates non-party members but as he says, this is not set up to be a service to them…

• Mark Pack 21st Apr '07 - 5:08pm

  I think Jeremy’s got a good point. A lot of my postings are deliberately round-ups of news that someone like Guido will have already read elsewhere but which someone who spends less time reading political sites probably won’t have read.

• Duncan Borrowman 22nd Apr '07 - 1:18am

  Rob (and the new franchise holder) has a hard tightrope to tread. People like me have complained (rightly or wrongly) about things posted in haste in the past, but it needs to stay informative. As Rob says it isn’t ConHome and there is a rich Lib Dem blogosphere out there. Which as Liberals is a good thing.