Peoria Pundit

Well, the anonymous blogger has some out of the closet, as it were. It was IlliniPundit, who announced he is GOP activist Gordy Hulten, who very recently worked on Judy Myers’ campaign for the Illinois State Senate.

Some background: IlliniPundit is one of the top political blogs in Illinois, and is centered on the local political scene in Champaign-Urbana. The blogger went simply by the name “IlliniPundit.”

In January, IlliniPundit announced he was quitting the blog, but instead of closing it down, he was turning over posting duties to a list of Champaign County politicians and party activists. The reason, he said, was that he was working for a number of candidates under his real name and he didn’t want to compromise them. The problem? One of the 11 “new bloggers” on IlliniPundit was to be “Gordy Hulten: Champaign County Young Republican.”

What it boils down to is this, it’s OK to be an anonymous blogger. In fact, I encourage people who cannot blog openly without suffering repercussions at work to do so with a pseudonym. Of course, there’s a price to be paid for blogging anonymously. The first is that people have every right question your motives. The second is that bloggers sometimes get exposed.

But it’s not OK to use your anonymity to be untruthful or to yank your reader’s chains. Gordy Hulten/IlliniPundit did that by creating publicly quitting and turning his blog over to others, when in fact he was continuing to write articles. He did this specifically to avoid responsibility for the things he wrote under the “IlliniPundit” identity, and he did it to protect his clients, to protect himself from being possibly dumped by clients.

I’ve always rooted for IP. I like the blog. But I would have liked a lot more transparency from the beginning about who he was and the fact that he was a player in the game. In retrospect, he should not have started blogging anonymously if he had any inkling he was going to be working in the field of politics. He stopped posting anonymously back in January, and I appreciate that he was trying improve on a bad situation. But the best thing he could have done would have been to come clean then. I seriously doubt that his being IlliniPundit would have mattered one whit to voters. By not being upfront, it seems to be a bigger thing than it was.

But I’m assured that transparency is the rule now at IlliniPundit and for that I am glad.

Welcome back IP.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Citizen Journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.