Colin Espiner is leaving the gallery and moving back to Christchurch. His last column is here.
Colin is/was arguably the most popular political blogger in the country – metrics around these things are slippery but the volume of comments is a pretty good indication of success and almost every post in On the House attracted well over a hundred comments. This is especially impressive given the delayed nature of the Stuff comments system which precludes the near real-time conversations you see in comments threads in blogs like PublicAddress, Kiwiblog and The DimPost.
Whenever a political story broke I always looked forward to Colin’s take. Many of the left-wing bloggers saw him as a flack for the National party – but it’s the job of a political columnist to comment on the performance of political parties and for the lifetime of Colin’s blog Labour languished in the polls while National dominated the political landscape. I didn’t agree with everything he wrote, or think he got everything right but his opinion always seemed detached and genuine.
Hopefully Fairfax will strong-arm one of it’s other gallery journalists into a routine of regular blogging (Tracy Watkins’ posts are good, but infrequent.) Their whole politics page could use a little curation – there’s still a page column devoted to the 2009 budget and the political opinion pieces by Upton, James and Long can sometimes take over a week to come up on the site, and they’re never linked to from the main politics page. Stories disappear off the page after a few hours as new ones roll on. Maybe Colin could use his awesome new powers as a tyrant in the Fairfax Kratocracy to impose a make-over.
Yes congrats to Colin for putting himself out there. I have a little sympathy for him because as has been said all partisans hate you when you criticise their particular team/colour/brand. The comments section of his blog was sometimes more ridiculous than kiwislog and that takes some hard work
What I would say is he ‘had’ to focus too much on the horse race of politics, which is a continual frustration for me in our political analysis and discourse. The horse race tended to make the conversation shallow and partisan but to a degree its what the punters want.
He would also drop a few clangers, talking about average kiwis all at the batch at xmas,new cars and tax cuts for the ‘average kiwi’ $70k wage bracket. Shows how out of touch press gallery reporters can get when you consider those to be average.
Colin, good luck.
Comment by andy (the other one) — March 22, 2010 @ 4:01 pm
“For the lifetime of Colin’s blog Labour languished in the polls while National dominated the political landscape.”
For those who missed the dig: the blog’s lifetime is the past eight years.
Comment by anonymous — March 22, 2010 @ 8:44 pm
He’s been writing his column for eight years – the blog only dates back to June 2007.
Comment by danylmc — March 22, 2010 @ 8:48 pm
“Tracy Watkins’ posts are good”. Is that what you call satire?.
Comment by johnbt — March 23, 2010 @ 4:52 pm