PD suspends political blog

The Plain Dealer today suspended a controversial politics blog called “Wide Open” that had sought to provide a different approach by using non-staff established bloggers, both conservative and liberal.

Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher reports:

But when one of the two liberal bloggers was asked this week to withhold his comments on a specific congressional race after it was revealed he had contributed to one of the candidates, he resigned. That led to an uproar among other bloggers and some readers, which ended with the second liberal blogger stepping down and the paper deciding the approach was not workable with just two conservatives.

Jean Dubal, PD Assistant Managing Editor/Online wrote:

“A car can't run on two wheels, and Wide Open can't continue with only one side of the political spectrum represented. So we're going to call an indefinite halt to the project and step back to regroup.

“We still believe that newspaper and newspaper Web sites need to engage the new media. Our first effort in that direction obviously didn't fare well, but it would have been a still greater mistake not to make the attempt.

“Over the next few days and weeks we'll be giving a lot of thought to alternative ways of accomplishing the same end.”

The suspension of the site, which first launched on Sept. 24, follows a week of ups and down, which included the two resignations and various critiques among Ohio political insiders.

"When we set this up, the idea was to find a way to engage the larger community, the Web-based community, the political blogosphere," Dubail told E&P Friday. "We wanted to create a useful, insightful dialogue."

Although the Plain Dealer already had a traditional newspaper political blog, "Openers," it was overseen by the paper's own political reporters, who were obviously limited in their opinions as journalists. "Wide Open" sought to give true bloggers that were not linked to the paper a place to create opinionated discussions.

Click on the headline to read the full article by Strupp