John Edwards
Saturday, August 16th, 2008
by Jeff
Will Senator Susan Collins comments on John Edwards have any effect on her campaign? That’s what the Portland Press Herald asked retired political science professor Oliver Woshinsky today:
In connection with this election, I think it will have exactly zero effect. There are so many things that are going to happen between now and the election. The economy and oil prices are going to take absolute precedence, and the war is still on people’s minds.
No offense to Mr. Woshinsky, but that’s a big duh.
So while I still have your attention, and since I won’t have it for much longer as this whole thing starts to die down, let me address something about our interview with Senator Collins. One question I see asked over and over on the comments in blogs and on the Press Herald’s site is why we didn’t ask Senator Collins about John McCain’s past indiscretions. Answer: It’s old news, and not the current water cooler talk among our target audience.
We asked the senator a year ago about Larry Craig when he was the talk of the nation, and she was also very candid with her opinion on that matter. We’ve even brought up silliness from John McCain previously which you can hear in our interview with Senator Collins here:
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The thing I wonder most about this newsmaker we seemed to create, is would it have even been news if we didn’t have the video? Would anyone have gotten the audio from our daily podcast?
Ain’t the internet a crazy thing?
Friday, August 15th, 2008
by Jeff
The Susan Collins video is still spreading to my astonishment. It made the front page above the fold of the Porltand Press Herald which quoted me in a telephone interview and from this blog. I caught it last night on WCSH 6’s NewsCenter at 5:30, and it made the 6PM newscast on WGME 13.
The Associated Press picked up on the story and it’s made its way to The Boston Globe.
Now the question on my mind is how far will this go? What started out on political blogs is now spreading through mainstream New England press. Will it hit network news? CNN? Fox? NESN? The Food Network? It still unfolds.
There’s one thing that should be pointed out in WCSH’s story and a few others I’ve seen posted, and thanks to bloggers for noticing too. Senator Collins was NOT asked if she thought the child belonged to John Edwards. She volunteered her opinion on that.
I’ve heard from Collins staff and she is still a friend of the station and is still willing to appear on our show in the future. When she does it should be an interesting conversation to say the least.
Here are a few more links to sites that are covering this story. A few of these links are the same story as it was pulled from the AP. WCSH 6’s video is above, and kudos to them for including embed codes for their videos.
WGME News on FOX 23
FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog
Boston Globe
As Maine Goes Forum
Bangor Daily News
The Sun Journal
Foster’s Daily Democrat
Seacoast Online
PolitickerME – A new quick blurb in their Winners and Losers column
PolitickerME - A more recent post that quotes an earlier post of mine.
Thursday, August 14th, 2008
by Jeff
Wow what a day this turned out to be. 24 hours after we did what seemed like a typical interview with Senator Susan Collins on The Q Morning show, I never would have imagined it would be revisited. I guess that’s what you get when you decide to have a webcam in the studio and a United States Senator says something that is viewed as controversial.
I started running a live webcam using ustream.tv earlier this year. I think Interactivity is vitally important to broadcast media these days, and I was doing my part to provide that.
A nice feature that comes with ustream.tv is the ability to record from the webcam and embed it on a webpage, which is what I did when I posted the video here after the interview. The internet being what it is, things can become viral very quickly, and the next day we got a phone call saying that the video had spread to many political blogs and You Tube. The political blogs of course were mostly democratic, since Senator Collins is republican.
I couldn’t imagine what the fuss was about until I did a Google blog search and found the excitement was over a comment Senator Collins made about John Edwards. It never crossed my mind that people would think this was shocking, inappropriate, uncalled for, or whatever anyone might think about the comment.
I’m not going to lie. I loved this! Finally some attention on my meaningless little blog in the corner of the internet. So I spent the day reading all the posts all over the internet and even posting in the comment section on a few. It’s really been great reading.
The news eventually made it to the mainstream media with The Portland Press Herald calling me for an interview, WCSH requesting a copy of the video, and WGME running the story and linking directly to this blog. My traffic suddenly started to spike in the afternoon, and when I checked where it was coming from, it was wgme.com Very cool.
I’m am relieved though. I’ve been told that Senator Collins will be happy to return to our show in the future. That was my only real worry about all the hub bub. Hey at least it wasn’t like our interview with Barack Obama.
It’ll be an interesting show tomorrow. It’ll be the first time we include ourselves in our newscasts.
In case you’d like to read the reactions to the interview for yourself, I’ve compiled a handy list of all the places I’ve found one. If you have one yourself, let me know.
Making the news must be a family thing today. My dad even got a headline in the Sun Journal. Weird.
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
by Jeff
One of the really cool things about Senator Susan Collins is that politics aside, she really is a very down to earth and genuinely nice woman. She’s not afraid to speak her mind on the cheating John Edwards or give a hug to a man who is clearly starved for attention.
See what I mean in this video from her appearance this morning.
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