Vote for Pedro!
Sue asks -- in her own special New York way she is asking -- why we didn't cover the bloggers candidates' forum Tuesday night. On Monday, we published a schedule of this week's forums. The bloggers forum was one of three.
We didn't cover it, or the others, for two primary reasons. First, very little substantive news comes out of forums. As I've read the reports by bloggers there, I still believe that. The structure doesn't lend itself to much light. Candidate responses tend to be either canned or superfluous. Follow-up questions are hard to squeeze in. Given that we've talked with virtually all of the candidates in one-on-one interviews which we use for articles about the races in the paper, we don't get a whole lot out of the forums.
The second reason is that there are so many forums during election season, we need to pick and choose carefully. We could have had a reporter at each forum this week and gotten nothing else out of him (in this case, City Hall reporter Matt Williams.) We choose to let him spend his time working on other stories that might be more helpful to readers.
In an ideal world, one in which we had more reporters, we would staff every forum. We know we're at risk of missing a story when we skip the forums, but, in the end, we've decided that it's a risk worth taking.
Meanwhile, visit Seymour Hardy Floyd for information on the forum itself. Greensboro101 has some audio up, too.