Bloggers and Think Tanks: A Dream Team

By Christian Schneider
Published on Tuesday, April 01, 2008
ARTICLES

Imagine the nation's best college football coach, standing at his chalkboard, diagramming plays. He has spent hours staring, bleary-eyed, at videotapes of his next opponent. He has missed meals with his family in order to spend obscene amounts of time diagramming plays that will secure victory in this week's game.

Then, imagine that coach has no team.

With all the work he puts in researching his next opponent, a coach needs his players to carry out the game plan. Otherwise, regardless of how brilliant his research is, he's talking to an empty room.

Across America, free market think tanks are starting to figure out how to put together "teams" to implement their game plans. These teams are made up primarily of the "citizen media," i.e., bloggers. When free-market think tanks begin to involve bloggers in their dissemination of ideas, it provides the institutes with a large, influential web of voices that can highlight issues that may not receive coverage in the mainstream media.

Think tanks can reach out to bloggers for any number of reasons. In Utah, the Sutherland Institute began reaching out to bloggers out of sheer necessity. During a recent statewide school voucher debate, the Institute noticed several bloggers linking to their materials. "We noticed that we were being quoted and misquoted," said Sutherland's director of operations Lyall Swim. "We respectfully confronted the lefty bloggers about the misinformation," said Swim.

The Institute then took the next step, which was to begin to line up center-right bloggers on their side. They visited the "Utah Blog Hive," a website that collects citizen commentary from around the state, and enlisted the right-leaning contributors. Shortly thereafter, they held their first "blogger breakfast," which included a speech from the lieutenant governor and a policy discussion amongst the 15 bloggers in attendance. Based on the initial success, Swim indicated that the Institute has started holding similar briefings on a monthly basis.

Michigan's Mackinac Center for Public Policy recently held its own blogger party, bringing citizen journalists together with the goal of raising state policy discussions to a higher level. The Center identified around 30 free-market friendly bloggers and invited them to a meet-and-greet in Lansing, the state capital. According to Jack McHugh, senior legislative analyst at Mackinac, the energy and networking interactions were intense. Since the event, the Center has received a steady stream of policy information requests from the bloggers who were invited, and many more citations of its own work in the state's blogosphere. Several of the attendees have said they want to host bloggers parties themselves.

In Washington, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation launched its own blog ("Liberty Live") in October of 2007. According to vice president of communications Steven Maggi, the Foundation "realized that in order to communicate into the next century we needed to participate in the social marketing happening via the internet." According to Maggi, Liberty Live has already generated numerous press stories, blogger chatter and legislative action, which has served to raise Evergreen's profile statewide.

While still a nascent technology, local blogging already has some significant achievements under its belt. In July of 2007, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI) published a blog post criticizing a proposed statewide universal health plan that Democrats had slipped into the state budget at the last minute. WPRI pointed out that such a plan would be a magnet for the uninsured of America, opening Wisconsin's doors to the nation's sickest individuals. While never reported in the mainstream media, this point was echoed on blogs throughout the state, and became the fact most likely to turn citizens against the plan, according to statewide polls.

According to their individual websites, at least 16 State Policy Network members themselves maintain active blogs. This is an excellent way to deliver timely policy analysis to your state's bloggers, who can then pick the information up and run with it. Being proactive in cultivating a blogger network is going to be crucial in upcoming years, considering left-of-center think tanks are already heavily utilizing their bloggers.

Free market think tanks have already figured out that getting mainstream press coverage for their work is about as difficult as teaching a giraffe to sing the national anthem. But having a "team" of interested citizens on call to help disseminate information can aid in letting the world see the fruits of your labor.

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Christian Schneider is a fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, and a contributor to the "Here and Now" show on Wisconsin Public Television. He can be reached at christian@wpri.org.

Blogger Resource

The Lucy Burns Institute, an SPN associate member, provides resources for free-market think tanks that want to reach out to and start working with philosophically allied bloggers. For detailed how-to's,coaching guidance or to subscribe to the Institute's e-newsletter,please contact LBI president Burns at l.graves@lucyburns.org or project director Sherry Schultz at sherryschultz08@gmail.com.

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