With the recent 2009
Longmont election season coming to an end, so to will
Wrongmont. The point of the site as I said back in late August when I resuscitated it was to be a news and opinion aggregator for all things related to the election. It served its purpose, and then some.
While the Wrongmont name had been around since 2002 (and basically just morphed into
Longmont Advocate in 2008), I had no idea of its impact when I was considering reviving the brand name. While people made a big fuss about chicken sites with graphic images, and pretenders and copiers made feeble attempts to mirror what I was doing, Wrongmont chugged along putting out on average
a story a day. And unlike typical blog sites, these weren't just hyperlinks to other articles with a sentence or two of comment. These were full blown,
700+ word commentaries on candidates and the race.
The attention the site got in this short 2.5 month run was more than all the previous years combined, being commented about on blog sites, newspaper articles and websites, and even mentioned in the Federal lawsuit against the
City of Longmont and its
Fair Campaign Practices Act. The traffic numbers, especially in the days before and after Election Day were all time highs. People were doing searches to find out the issues, and many of them ended up either at Wrongmont, Longmont Advocate, or our voter registration drive site
Vote Longmont. The candidates I went after
LOST. The candidates Vote Longmont endorsed
WON. Doesn't get much better than that, and as I said,
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Of course the outcry and attack on Wrongmont was also at all time highs. Some people just hate the name and everything they
think it stands for. It was singled out in Open Forum letters in the
Times-Call, I was referred to as "
Mr. Wrongmont" on a defeated councilmembers campaign website, people made fun of the name. But what they never got was that
I wasn't running for anything, and they wasted their time on me accordingly. All they proved was their intolerance for differing opinions, and it sunk them.
Not all the goals of the site were met though: I wanted voter turnout to go up, it didn't. While
Longmont did have a higher turnout than Boulder - and that is worth bragging about - it was still only around 40%, some races varied. It seemed like more people got involved and interested, there were new voices being heard from, not all of them pleasant, but what can you do.
So, Wrongmont again cruises into the sunset. And like I said when I revived it, never assume I'm ever ashamed of the name or the content. It has a role, it filled it quite effectively, and
I never apologize for being effective.
...until next election, or
recall.........
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©2009 Chris Rodriguez/Longmont Advocate LLC (Chris Rodriguez is a Longmont resident, and the publisher and broadcaster of Longmont Advocate, a community website and podcast that raises local issues to increase public awareness and interest)