After a very confusing vote on a local school bond, I’ve stepped down from my old project Blue Hampshire, to start a local information site, called Citizen Keene.

There were an number of other reasons for stepping down — as a newly promoted Director at a public college, I wanted to move away from being a prominent figure in partisan politics. Additionally, the workload of running Blue Hampshire was significant, and did not fit into my new job.

But those are more reasons for stepping down from Blue Hampshire.

The reason I started Citizen Keene is I felt the flow of local information was broken. Talking to people after the school bond failure, I found time and time again that the people who hadn’t voted, or had voted in a way that they later regretted once they learned the facts — these people were often good friends with people who had the facts.

But for whatever reason this information just was not transmitted.

And it was significant information. Almost no one understood what the rejection of the bond meant. The rejection of the bond didn’t save money — because a stay against enforcing certain code violations at the current middle school was predicated on the new school being built.

The upshot? The town will now spend $7 million dollars on band-aid fixes in the next two years, the school auditorium and industrial arts wing will close for at least three years, and current 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders will likely spend their middle school years in portable trailer.

The turnout was 16%. The bond failed by 24 votes. Now that the vote is over, there’s no end of people that didn’t vote or voted it down who believe they weren’t provided the information they needed to make the decision. No one would have voted this way had they had the facts.

It’s easy to look at that and say, well, you should have just done your homework.

But I’ve never seen that response solve anything. On the whole the amount of time that people are willing to put toward these things is constant. If you can get that information to them more efficiently you can change things. But you’re not going to shame them into spending more time to become informed. It just doesn’t work that way.

So Citizen Keene isn’t about technology, or Facebook coolness, or IPOs. It’s about the fact my 3rd grade daughter is likely to spend her middle school years in a trailer while they fix fire code issues in a school the town had been trying to move out of since 1968. And that’s going to happen because information flow is broken, and I want to fix that.

In coming days, I hope to explain why I chose the technoogy I did to build the site, and what the relation of this experiment is to academic technology and online communications. So please stay tuned, even is this doesn’t seem like it ties into the traditional subjects of this blog. It all ties in I promise, and will be useful to everybody from professors to college web editors.

But it does start with my daughter’s future, and it has a deep meaning to me. That’s step one.

So there’s a front page article today in the Wall Street Journal. The subject? My political blog, Blue Hampshire. The title?

“Have a Laptop? You, Too, Can Sway New Hampshire Race.”

 Subtitle?

“Self-Appointed Bloggers
Get Candidate Face Time;
On the Bus With Edwards”

You know, there’s so much insecurity in that headline that I’m nervous for the WSJ. I really want to pat them on the head and tell them it’ll be all right.

Personally I think the article is a catalog of the traditional misconceptions about bloggers, sort of Andrew Keen without all the bombast. The weird thing is it’s not a hatchet job (well, except for the dot portrait that looks nothing like me). I mean, it’s an honest attempt to understand this phenomenon through the lens of tradmed. It captures what we do, but then places that into the culture of access, status, centralized control, and nonparticipation that is predominant in tradmed. And the result is that we’re portrayed as just reporters running around with less professionalism.

Am I happy about the article though? Extremely. Front page WSJ, man. The people who get what we’re about will see that and visit us. The people that don’t won’t. That’s fine by me.

One of the absolutely consistent features of website development (at least in my neck of the woods) is that storytelling problems are miscast as technology platform problems.

Here’s a typical example. I’m currently working with a department to move them to a third party vendor, and in demonstrating a sample site one of the possible vendors shows a Hall of Fame gallery that features a video of an interview with a Hall of Fame coach. And it’s cut together nicely, with some original footage and Ken Burns style photo scans.

Cue oohs and ahhs. This is something they’ve wanted to do for some time.

But of course, the vendor didn’t produce the video. They merely put it up, a process that we could do on the current site if we had the video.

We don’t have a technology gap; we have a skills gap. We tell stories about our Hall of Fame coaches already. But we don’t have the internal capability to tell them in the way people now wish to hear them.

What’s changed from several years ago is where we once needed writers we now need full service media producers, and where we once could control the spin of a story, we now need to lay it out there a little more naked. It’s not enough to simply hire writers anymore. You need to hire a writer that can put together the sports video, take the photographs, and post it up on the web. Someone that knows how to both get the who-what-when-where-why and also how to do a simple video edit. Someone who gets the new culture of transparency and can write in the new web idiom.

In short, although I suppose every person in that vendor presentation would be shocked to hear it, you need to hire bloggers. For in the end, what would make more of a difference? Presenting the sports site on the new vendor platform? Or hiring a sports blogger instead of the average intern?

Which would build more of a following and have a greater effect on recruitment? Generate more alumni excitement? Have a greater bottom line effect?

My guess is for the majority of cases if you pit advanced technology against a compelling blogger, the blogger will always win. And organizations that begin to hire with that in mind will benefit.