Genevieve Simms

The pay is terrible. Ideas, no matter how well thought out and crafted, may only draw a readership that can be measured by the dozen. Politicians threaten lawsuits if you outsmart them. In short, even as a hobby, writing a blog isn’t the most prestigious gig.

However, in a province where political and social issues are often argued in black-and-white terms, Alberta’s bloggers offer colourful discourse for a news-hungry public looking for discussion and debate on issues not always represented in mainstream media.

Blogs, or weblogs, have come a long way since their mid-’90s inception. Back then, they were primarily viewed as online diaries. By the early part of this century, they evolved into effective tools where one could espouse their views and report on issues mainstream media were missing.

Case in point: In January, the Calgary Herald ran a story centred on a rumoured faction within the Alberta Liberal party that was reportedly bent on starting a new centrist political entity. On the surface, it appeared the Herald broke the story. The reality, however, was that the story had been broken days earlier by an anonymous blogger. After the story made it to print, the paper dropped it, but it continues to be fleshed out and to generate much debate on a number of Alberta blogs.

While blogs may occasionally be ahead of the news curve, they won’t replace authoritative mainstream media, says Ken Chapman, an Edmonton-based policy analyst and blogger. “They can supplement it. They can be in addition or parallel to, but I don’t think they’re going to be as authoritative. Many of us rely on the mainstream media for our sources and we do commentary and takeoff on it and analysis on it. We’re not gathering the stories.”

In 2008, Dave Cournoyer, a political science student at the University of Alberta, went from merely analyzing issues on his then three-year-old blog to being the issue.

Lawyers representing Alberta’s premier threatened the budding blogger with legal action for using the domain name edstelmach.ca. The warning and ensuing media coverage vaulted Cournoyer’s daveberta blog to new heights.

“I have a lot of disagreements with the premier, but one thing I can do is thank him for quadrupling my readership after that incident,” says the 25-year-old political science student.

Cournoyer says one of his biggest concerns is with the centralization of Canadian media, which coupled with cutbacks, could result in less focus on local political and community issues. “I think you’re going to see the potential for people to move online, take a different strategy and fill in those gaps,” he says. “There’s a lot of potential for citizens to come in and form a group blog or an e-magazine. I think that’s what we could see in the next couple months, especially with the CanWest situation. I mean, there’s going to be a lot of reporters looking for a future.”

Saddled with a $3.9-billion debtload, CanWest Global, which owns a number of newspapers and television stations, has struggled to stave off bankruptcy. The company was given until March 11 to renegotiate the terms of its debt with its lenders.

David Climenhaga, a journalist and self-described unsophisticated blogger, contends incredibly bad management on the part of people who run newspapers is as much to blame as the failing economic model. “I tend to feel that newspaper management drove their core readership onto the Internet rather than people were abandoning newspapers for the Internet willingly,” he says.

“The problem was the product, for a variety of reasons, I think, has become so bad that people are just being chased away,” says Climenhaga, who now works as the communications director for the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees. “They’ve got a narrow range of opinion, it’s all the same opinion in all of them and very few people will go out and take an opinion contrary to the mainstream line that the papers are pushing.”

Chapman doesn’t hold out much hope for the newspaper business. “I think we’re going to lose them all,” he says. “What’s happening is that information is becoming free, and individuals like bloggers are becoming the medium. And it’s kind of scary on one level in the culture shift to the anonymity.”

While Chapman and Cournoyer are upfront about their identity, others like the authors of Alberta Get Rich or Die Trying (AGRDT) and The Enlightened Savage (ES) are less forthcoming. Both contend their criticisms could have negative ramifications on current or future livelihoods.

“We want people to take it for what it is,” says one member of the collective that is AGRDT. “We don’t pretend to be the end all or be all on facts and news. And we try not to write anything that can’t be backed up by a link or research. We see our role as bloggers as starting discussion and debate rather than publishing news or facts or breaking things.”

ES’s titular author argues the “who” behind the pen name isn’t as important as the “what” on the blog. With anonymity, previously held preconceptions based on knowledge of a person’s background or appearance is negated, leaving the reader nothing to focus on but the message, says Enlightened Savage.

“In a lot of ways, lack of public knowledge of who is writing this blog gives it a little bit more of an allure. It could be just about anybody. It could be the bus driver. It could be the nurse at the Rockyview,” says Enlightened Savage. “The important thing isn’t what that person does. The important thing is what that person has to say. And that’s a fairly new idea. It’s not just soapboxes for Star Trek fans living in mom’s basement.”