Democracy2.0
Expressing the state’s political voice through digital diary

By Pamela Buechel

Christian Schneider led a double political life. By day, he was a diligent aide to a Republican state senator. By night, he fashioned himself as blogger Dennis York, jabbing away at both aisles in Wisconsin’s Capitol. For nearly two years he played his dual roles, never letting on at work the ideological Batman role he played at home.

“[My boss and I] were in a meeting one time with another state senator, and we were talking,” Schneider recalls. “He turned to my boss and said, ‘You know, I really agree with Dennis York on this and this and this,’ not knowing that it was me.”

In his blog, “Stand Next to This Money,” Schneider wrote with the voice of the everyday unsung hero, filling his pages with witty euphemisms and juicy politics.

“Just working up in the Capitol and dealing with drafting new laws and the insider politics … you see a lot of things that seem like they’re really misrepresented of how things really happen,” Schneider says. “Being someone who was on the inside, I thought it was a good idea to start a blog to explain a little bit of what goes on inside the Capitol.”

Despite the fact that close to nobody knew who the real Dennis York was, hundreds of people, both citizens and legislators, tuned in daily to read his opinions and innermost thoughts. The blog became well-respected and well-read throughout the blogging community until its end in February 2007.

The political blogging culture in Wisconsin provides anyone a medium in which they can share their thoughts, ideas and opinions on the day’s news stories. Because writers base their entries on fact and allow for discussion, blogs work as a forum to increase political communication.

Detailed and reliable information on Wisconsin politics has been widely available online since WisPolitics.com launched in 2000 and its sister site WisOpinion.com was created in 2002. WisPolitics focuses on providing readers with political stories from objective sources such as newspapers, television and radio, as well as listing press releases sent out by members of the Wisconsin Legislature. WisOpinion launched as the opinion-based supplement to WisPolitics’ objective nature. The new site provides an index of blogs from opinion writers across the state.

“We do daily links each day [to] find the blogs and what editorial writers are saying, [then] post it in one place so people don’t have to float around to 30 different blogs every day,” says Mike Schramm, WisOpinion editor.

WisOpinion featured just six blogs when it began its blog index in April 2004. Today, it houses about 350 politically driven blogs covering a wide range of topics from overall political views to specific political issues, such as abortion. The site now amasses nearly 1.5 million hits a year.

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