I left Austin too early on Sunday to see San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s appearance. But fortunately SF Gate has a review, including Newsom’s thoughts on blogging.
If you had any doubt that Newsom was a policy/politics geek, keep in mind that a political blogging conference was probably his last road trip before he gets married Saturday. Oh, duuuuude…
Our chat was all about new media — and the mayor gets it. Officially, he was in Austin to introduce green god Van Jones — “he’s a superstar” Newsom gushes — as the keynote speaker for Sunday’s final keynote address. While his 26-hour Austin whirlwind here didn’t include any fundraisers, it was largely to work the netroots and generate a little online buzz for Newsom’s budding gubernatorial run.
OK, so the Sunday morning intro slot isn’t exactly prime time. Only a few hundred of the 2,000 attendees had shaken off Austin’s excesses for the 10 a.m. start, but Newsom made the most of it. He got a very warm welcome, with a few folks standing, and delivered a 15-minute intro/speech that focused on San Francisco’s many green projects and experiments. The audience lapped up every green morsel — then again, this was a crowd where Newsom’s brag on San Francisco’s 70 percent recycling rate was an applause line.
Newsom is no stranger to online communication. He’s been regularly courting Bay Area bloggers for stories that the uh, ahem, other news poohbahs in town aren’t into. Just this week, he chatted up the city’s wind power project with a handful of local and statewide bloggers. He’s a Daily Kos and Huffington Post regular reader and occasional poster, and he copped to following threads around Facebook. “I really don’t have time to be on there,” he said of the social networking time suck.
“I’m not a convert, I’m one who recognizes the power and extraordinary influence the netroots have. Not just with politics, but it’s about a different interactions with people.” He went to Austin because “I wanted to understand more fully the intensity behind those names. We actually met ‘Bill in Portland Maine.'”
Yeah, reading the comments on a post can be brutal at times — “like you want to go to therapy” he said — but Newsom said he digs the give-and-take. Plus he gets questions about the more esoteric policy points that many traditional reporters never ask. And by posting directly, he gets to circumvent the media gatekeepers.
“The feedback is great. And what I love about it, for me, is that we throw something out there, but the value-added is what we get back — all the posting. They’ll say, ‘This guy is a nut. That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard. Doesn’t he already know they’re doing this in Nova Scotia?’ I’m like, fine, I didn’t know that – let’s research it. And so I learn about what they’re doing in Nova Scotia. I couldn’t get that dialogue, candidly, if I just show up on a TV show. That’s a one-way communication.”
“That’s the wealth in this. This makes me a better politician, and not just a politician, it makes me a better policy person. It’s not just a campaign tool. Now, if I run for governor, obviously, it will become a politics tool, as well.”
At the same time, he feels the you’re-always-on aspect of new media tends to make politicians more risk-averse for fear of gaffeing. Even though bloggers crowded around him and pulled him aside for videoblog interviews while he was in Austin, sometimes he forgot that the camera was always rolling. Then again, Newsom should be used to that happening back home.
Some politicians get the culture and meaning of political blogging and others don’t. The ones that get it are going to prosper.
