To blog or not to Blog That is a question.

I have been blogging about South Korean politics for more than five years, I am always thinking how can I drive more audiences to my blog, and how can I increased my influence on the South Korea political discourse. I have attempted to try in many different ways, and I concluded some of criteria’s that requires for a great political blog post.

First: It should create public discourse by suggesting some controversial and important issue in the society.
Second: Finding the importance topic that most of mass media do not cover because of their commercial interest.
Third: Try to simple as possible, but let readers know what the nut graf of certain issue is.
Fourth: It should be easy to read and the post should be interesting and humorous in some way.
Fifth: Be more efficient, don’t compete with the mass media, use the facts that other media covered and concentrating on analysis, or just putting all the facts and let readers think about it.

According to ‘Taein’s five criteria’s for the best political blogs, I think NPR’s two-way, and it is all politics blog meet the standards. And I love to read their posts every day. Here is the post that I liked from ‘It’s all politics’

Boehner: Good Jobs Data Due to Tax Cuts (Not Obama Stimulus):

In this post, Frank James didn’t write a long post (it’s about two paragraphs), and used one data from labor department, and quotes from John Boehner. But this post suggestses several important points to readers.

1. U.S economy is recovering,
2. There is a political fights among Washington who take credits from this economy rebounding.
3. Whether Obama’s stimulus plan have worked or not.

Provided that, there are more than two-hundred comments from readers on this two paragraphs post. I thought it was amazing that just two paragraphs and easily written post works really well provoking political discussions among NPR readers, most of them are very highly educated.

And here is another post from Two-way that I like.

Is Ivory Coast now in Civil War?

Compared to James post, this one is relatively wrong, it is about three paragraphs, and the writer researched a little more than James. He used sources from AP/BBC/New York Times/UN, and this post covers the topic that most of the mass media have been ignored. And the writer did a really good job to compress this important and difficult issue into three paragraphs without messing any core issues in here.

And this is marvelous sentences that writer can write in blog post but not often in actual news paper.

The AP says the UN is reporting more than 200,000 people have fled Ivory Coast’s main city, Abidjan, to escape fighting. That’s like everybody deciding to get out of Des Moines, Iowa as fast as they can. You’d notice.

So this is a good example that, the story that readers can easy to read and informed the core conflict of it.

Of course, I think there is tons of limitation on political blogging and I don’t believe blogs could replace news website, or newspaper, but still there are lots of vacant rooms in our world and its conflicts where mass media wouldn’t cover but good political blogger might fill it, and expand the political discourse further and further.