Welcome to Politically Connected
October 1st, 2007 – 2:17 AM by Dennis J. McGrathToday we launch this new website devoted to all things political. We invite you to explore – and then let us know what you think.
A highlight of our coverage today is the 2008 U.S. Senate race in Minnesota. You’ve probably already seen the Minnesota Poll results here showing that Sen. Norm Coleman and his leading Democratic opponents — Mike Ciresi and Al Franken — all have a lot of work ahead of them to win over voters.
Sen. Norm Coleman
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Al Franken
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Mike Ciresi
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And don’t miss the rest of the Senate race coverage, including:
–Our story about yesterday’s debate among the Democratic Senate candidates, here.
–Our video of the debate, here.
–D.J. Tice’s thoughts on the poll here, in his Big Question blog.
We’ll also be discussing the Senate poll results on today’s Pig’s Eye Podcast. That’s a weekly show about Minnesota politics that we’ll be recording and posting by mid-morning every Monday. (How quickly we get the posting up depends on how many of our mistakes Producer Jenni Pinkley has to edit out.) The show will be posted here.
By the way, if you’re not up on your Pig’s Eye lore, listen to our very first show — a rehearsal, as it were, which we’ve saved here. It provides a bit of Pig’s Eye history.
Let me point out a few other things to get you started:
Candidate pages: We’ve created separate pages for all the presidential and Minnesota U.S. Senate candidates. You’ll find a wealth of breaking news, bloggers’ comments, the latest pronouncements directly from the candidates and a record of how they’ve voted and what they’ve said on the key issues.
For the presidential candidates, we’re starting with Iraq, Immigration and Terrorism — and we’ll be adding more to that list soon, as well as posting the same issues for the Senate candidates. You can find the presidential candidate pages here and the Senate candidate pages here.
Campaign finance: Find out which Minnesotans are giving to the presidential candidates, and find out where the Senate candidates are getting their money. You’ll find the look-up box on the Home page as well as on the presidential and the Senate race pages, or you can use the advanced contributor search here.
Blogs: We’ve added two new blogs to go along with the Big Question. The Prez Fight will focus on the presidential race, with special emphasis on the Republican National Convention heading out way next summer. And my McMemo blog will direct you to the latest and the best political content on Politically Connected and elsewhere.
There’s a lot more on the site, but this should be plenty to get you started today.
Our goal is to provide you with a motherlode of political content from Minnesota and elsewhere, so you can spend less time searching — and more time reading, watching and debating.
We invite you to dig in get familiar with the site. This is just the first phase. Soon, we’ll be adding and planning more content and features. So please, give us feedback below. We welcome your reaction to the site as it is now, and your suggestions on what else you’d like to see.
Hope you enjoy getting Politically Connected.
Dennis J. McGrath
Editor
Politically Connected
10 Responses to "Welcome to Politically Connected"
Hi, I am a student at North Hennepin Community College, and I feel that this website will be a very influential source for me and other students to look at and help base our decisions on when it comes to political issues. I think that this is a great idea and I look forward to reading it very frequently. Keep up the good work Star Tribune
My hope is that this website will present both sides of the political equation on subjects. This way, the readers can make their decision based on the facts.
Fair and balanced will keep me as viewer. This will be a difficult task, and I wish you well.
Will you be providing an RSS feed for the podcast? It would be nice to be able to subscribe to it in ITunes.
mbrose: Yes we will. The podcast has been submitted to iTunes, and as soon as they generate the url, we’ll add it to the podcast page.
Good morning.
I like the idea, however I’m skeptical to engage because the Strib has a way of deleting comments and/or posting comments only when they seem to lean just far enough left.
I’ll just sit back for now.
Hope this works.
I don’t care for it.
“Politics” was better.
I thought today was PC’s first day. So why are so many items obsolete? I clicked onto the Fifth District link, and there were two events listed for mid September.
Otherwise, this looks like a fun but ambitious undertaking. Fun for us. Ambitious for you!
I like this expansion.
I particularly like that you’re attracting such high-quality posters already — nice to see you here, Senator Higgins.
The BQ is great and all, but the contributor pool is somewhat stagnant. A mainstream, pure politics blog which attracts actual policy makers to share their opinions in an informal way is what I had hoped would come of the BQ. I am extremely hopeful that this experment will deliver.
Is PrezFight going to display comments? Everything is going into moderation and never coming out.
Linda Higgins is a regular on the Minneapolis Issues list too. I hope that other policy makers will come and comment here.