Iowa’s Budding Political Blogosphere

The Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas took a look today at a rising political force, Iowa’s local political blogs:

“For the most part, the blogging community is small,” says [local blogger Chris] Woods, who blogs at Bleeding Heartland. “But Iowa’s blogging community reaches the core activists, the core voters and caucus-goers, who come online and talk politics.”

Other sites featured in the article include Iowa Independent, The Real Sporer, Conservative Cyclones, Century of the Common Iowan and Iowa True Blue. Many similar local blogs have sprung up all over the country over the past few years, and they’re not particularly hard to find if you know where to look (Googling “politics blog” and the name of the state in which you’re interested is usually a good start).

During the ’06 election cycle, I was baffled about why more candidates weren’t running ads on local political sites, since they’re usually quite cheap, often on the order of $25 or $50 per week, and they’re reaching a very tightly targeted audience. For more, see past articles on working with local bloggers and best practices for blog advertising as well as this write-up of a great discussion about spreading the word about issues through blogs. And of course there’s the Online Politics 101 piece on blogs and blogger relations.

Update: See also Sarah Lai Stirland’s earlier piece on Iowa political blogs, which notes the role of the Center for Independent Media in funding at least one of them.

– cpd