Motley Moose – Archive

As a marketer I have noticed some interesting trends in recent months.  Namely that traditional media (print, radio, TV) has started to decline in both consumption and advertising revenue.  Here in Canada, budgets are being slashed by international accounts and belts are being tightened.

What is interesting is that not 5 years ago, media outlets were ‘throwing in’ internet advertising as a bonus with a traditional media buy.  Well those days are long over. As a medium, the internet has exploded bringing with it much good and bad – especially in the political scene.

An enormous amount of Public Mass Media has been created this year in this transitional period following thousands of years of State-Controlled Media (see: “Egypt”), and dogging the heels of a few hundred years of Personally-Controlled Mass Media (see: “Rupert Murdoch”).  It presages a period that is much discussed and yet to be determined in type and form, and the impact of Public Mass Media is a matter of a great deal of current debate.

Four years ago the blogosphere had produced a set of individuals who had broken onto the public Media stage (see: “Drudge”) and public forums that set the precedents for places like Motley Moose (see: “MyDD” and “DailyKos”).  Today there are many individual contributors who have gained a fairly wide audience (see: “Ben Smith”, “”, “”) and a broad gamut of forums where Public Media is created by significant numbers of contributors.  Four years from now there will be a pervasive public understanding of how Public Media shapes our culture.

Now, we stand on a brink and often wonder “Does any of this make a difference to what happens in the world?”.  

Yes, it does.

Welcome to Motley Moose, the first netroots Progressive blog to be created by a consortium of dedicated bloggers.  The Moose was created by twenty-five active writers who have been contributing to the tradtional Progressive Blogs such as MyDD (the Blogfather) and DailyKOS.  We felt it was time for a new type of forum to add to the matrix that has flourished on the Intertubes, something that is more focused on the