News and Politics | December 15, 2008 | 14 comments

UK bloggers put David Cameron to the sword

source: http://www.sizemore.co.uk/2008/12/15/thomson-reuters-part-ii/

Beta_Boy
Following the success of Obama in the US presidential election and his mastering of social media to communicate and motivate his electoral base the UK political landscape has also begun to embrace social media.

News agency Thomson Reuters in the UK, have begun hosting events for social media pioneers, bloggers and citizen journalists, giving them the chance to pose questions to first Gordon Brown and now David Cameron.

Both Documentally and Sizemore (two of our favourite UK bloggers) have been capturing some fantastic footage from the event on Qik, 12seconds and Twitter and will no doubt be populating their blogs with some great stuff soon.

You can follow them now

http://twitter.com/sizemore
http://www.sizemore.co.uk/

http://twitter.com/documentally
http://ourmaninside.com/

Is this the future of political discussion? Will our politicians become seemingly more accountable? How will they cope knowing that from now on there is no 'off the record' discussion.
  1. groups:
    News and Politics,   Current News UK,   REUTERS
  2. tags:
    News and Politics,  Current News UK,  UK,  REUTERS,  5 more
  3. credits:
    Documentally Grilled David Cameron and the Tories, Sizemore Writing the good stuff!
  4.     
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14 comments // UK bloggers put David Cameron to the sword

  • mario_a
  • NatRed
  • abbym0308
    • 0
      abbym0308  

    • These politicians might not write their own blog, but they'll be the ones fielding questions from bloggers and citizen journalists who will go back and spread whatever they said like wildfire around the internet. So these kind of events the Reuters is hosting will be key.
      I think the internet absolutely holds politicians to greater accountability for what they do and say, particularly because information spreads so quickly and often in little clips devoid of much context. Whether or not it's them writing, it's delivered in their name or by them and so people will hold them to whatever message they say.

    • 3 years ago
  • swizzylions
  • beccatigger
    • 0
      beccatigger  

    • Oh come on they're not really going to write their own blog are they?

      We have a company blog which customers can ask questions on etc. All the messages are controlled both inbound and outbound and 80% of the time are never written by the person it says it is (unless it's been completely rewritten).

      Just another crap attempt at PR...

    • 3 years ago
  • richjm
  • richjm
    • 0
      richjm  

    • Cameron's speech wasn't Documentally and Sizemore's first dabbling into social media meets politics.

      In October, they documented Gordon Brown’s visit to the Reuters head office in London - live blogging the event and started conversations across the web. Click the link for video and more details about the day.

    • 3 years ago
  • AnnieMole
    • 0
      AnnieMole  
    • Image

    • Moves like this are a good start as was Obama's Digg style question & answer tool. I think the UK have got a long way to go though but are slowly beginning to see the benefits of more openly talking to their voters - not just at election time and wherever they choose to hang out.

    • 3 years ago
  • smurph25
  • Mr_Costello
    • 0
      Mr_Costello  

    • It's great to hear UK politicians are adopting social media, creating new avenues for conversation. I guess social media will soon be helping politicians bypass other media too!

    • 3 years ago
  • rebbill
    • 0
      rebbill  

    • It's great that the internet has led to this. It's why it was invented: no need to attend Oxbridge and have daddy run a paper to start to become a commentator. Love it and like to see more of this on Current.

    • 3 years ago
  • richjm
    • 0
      richjm  

    • This is actually more interesting than the coverage I've been watching on more mainstream news sources.

      According to @sizemore's Twitter feed, the Tory party's social media guru doesn't actually use Twitter himself.

      "@documentally asked the Tory social media guy for his Twitter name: "Well, I'm not on there personally" Big 'oh fuck' from around the table"

      (On Twitter too? Let's connect like drunk Lego bricks at pub chucking out time: http://www.twitter.com/richjm)

    • 3 years ago
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