The blog includes questions submitted by readers and editors and lets the candidates respond freely.

Some candidates have been upset by the fact that the editorial board of the paper said that participation in the online Q&A forum will be a criteria in helping them decide on endorsements.

“In a few weeks the editorial board will publish its endorsements. The discussions and comments fostered by this blog will carry weight in our deliberations,” wrote the Enquirer’s Editorial Page Editor David Wells.

“Candidate blogging is part of the newspaper’s increasing reliance on “crowd sourcing” to provide content for its print and online editions,” reported the Porkopolis blog.

In its print edition, the Enquirer explained that “candidates with smaller budgets or lower name recognition have in the past complained that the media never give them as much attention as better-known opponents. Some candidates have new ideas, but if their voices aren't heard, the voters never get to know about them.”

Pokopolis hints that the Enquirer’s motivations for implementing this new feature are more oriented towards generating traffic than they are intended to promote the public debate (the blog suggests that the paper print a supplement with the candidate’s responses if it is really serious about this program).

That’s probably the case, but the initiative is nonetheless valuable, both as a newspaper experiment for crowdsourcing and to engage readers in politics.

On the other hand, and this is probably unavoidable with this kind of experiment, “seasoned local political veterans are quietly admitting that campaign staffers are planting many of the questions. Staffers also are writing the replies in many instances, not the candidates themselves,” reported Porkopolis.

As of Friday at 4:30pm, about 16 questions had been posted to the blog, and there was a total of 29 responses by nine of the candidates.

Source: CityBeat’s Porkopolis