The Saanich News has a page dedicated to the election. as does the Peninsula News Review and the Sooke Mirror. The Victoria News, Oak Bay News and Goldstream Gazette do not. Monday Magazine has only had some sporadic coverage.
Not a single one of the news group papers offers any information on how to get a hold of any of the candidates.
The TC has a page dedicated to the local elections, but the number of stories on there is rather sparse. The number of candidates that have submitted information has been sparse. It would take them a matter of a couple of hours to simply make easy links available to all the candidate websites and to their social media sites. It is almost as if the TC would prefer that there was no election than actually make it easy to find good information on the candidates.
At the TC you look at more than 20 articles in a month, you are supposed to pay to view any more. This means you can not even get through the list of candidates for your area if they all had a profile online.
CFAX has been better this time around than in 2008, but still it does not really get to everyone running. Once again, they could offer links to candidates, but they do not.
This blog really got going in 2008 when I started to collate information about all the candidates in this region because no one else was doing it. I am now running at about 500 to 800 pageviews a day.
The most common searches are generic searches looking for information about candidates and all candidates meetings. People have no easy way to find this information. In almost any search related to the current local elections in this region my blog comes near the top. This is not right. The media should have all the top spots if they were offering what people wanted.
So if I can do this, why can't the media do it?
1 comment:
I think it all comes down to the media catering its stories to what it believes its readership wants.
Voter turnout in greater Victoria is often below 30% compared to 50-60% in recent provincial and federal elections. Some may interpret that as citizens not having much interest in municipal politics.
I see this as a chicken vs. egg issue, however. If it was easier for citizens to find out about candidates, I believe we would see higher turnouts.
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