DemocratsPittsford.org

The short answer is yes!  It’s the ‘how to win’ that gets more complex.  We can look back at the last election, still fresh in our minds, and probably come up with a myriad of mistakes made and opportunities missed.  However, that’s not what this post is about.  It is about moving forward.  It is about preparing for the next time.

  I only began attending committee meetings when I started to help Mike Nolan, but what I saw at our last meeting inspired me.  The members who were there were passionate, organized and ready to go to work.  If you need proof you only need to remember the committed visability organizers who stood at the four corners of Pittsford every morning and night from October 3rd right through election night.  Then we have the people who gave up their weekend to do  lit drops and those who came to phone bank on Monday and Tuesday.  Even with the unfortunate phone bank issue on election night the calls got made.  People were committed to follow through.  All this is good news for the future but there is more we need to do.

We need to keep up the hard work, passion, and organization throughout the year–not just at election time.  We have to commit to be involved for the long haul.  I have been giving this a lot of thought lately and I have come up with a few ideas, but we all need to get involved in this process.  Let’s begin a long term conversation with ideas and suggestions at how we can make our committee a player in the upcoming years.

Here are four things I’ve been thinking about…

 $$$– we need to do some fundraisers to sustain the committee and to help out local candidates early in their races.  Yes, they will do fundraising on their own, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get them started.

Community involvement-we need to have a solid presence at legislature meetings, all town board meetings, school board meetings, and anything else that affects our community.  We need to report back to the committee as to what issues are being discussed at the county, town,and village level.  If we are not fully informed we cannot present issues to  voters in a clear and concise way.

Committee members–We seem to have a lot of folks who are members in name only.  If we are to really accomplish the first two things we need to engage the members who do not feel connected.  This being Pittsford, I’m sure we have a large talent pool.  Let’s utilize our strengths.

Blogging–We need to help make this a viable, comprehensive blog where Democrats can come for information as well as putting forth ideas. 

As I said earlier, this is just the beginning of what I hope will be a long conversation–filled with inspiration, ideas, and hope for the future.  So now it’s your turn–start blogging…

We subconsciously know the real state of the news we learn about Pittsford.

Yet we still delude ourselves that the daily and weekly newspapers, combined with television news and radio, are telling us everything we need to know.

And now both the delusion and the reality are changing again.

First the delusion - somehow there is still a reporter everywhere - at Town Board meetings, doing in depth investigations if there were anything to investigate that would be coupled with big headlines that we could never miss.

Of course this state of affairs never existed. Not even back in the late sixties where you might, if you went to a Town Board meeting see reporters from one or more of the Democrat & Chronicle, Times-Union, and local weeklies (up in Webster there was a reporter generally present from the Webster Herald making it more informative than the Post paper).

Because even then the reporting was stenography, just literally reporting what was said rather than anything investigative. With one party rule, the opposition was ignored though just before local elections there might be a press release covered along with a brief coverage in the annual who is on the ballot story.

Since then, the T-U is gone and neither the daily nor the weeklies have field reporters. At best a reporter might rarely give someone a call. Weeklies are understaffed and overworked; the daily, with even zoned metro coverage, ignores the suburban governments - except for the pre-election roundups.

Whatever the opposition does - speak out at Town Board meetings, write letters to the editor, send out press releases, they get ignored.

To tell the truth, municipalities and incumbents fair little better. But they still know the value of good press and the need of the news media to fill the news hole, no matter how much it continues to shrink.

Enter the communications director or whatever it is named in your municipality, pumping out a regular stream of feel good stories about their bureaucracy. Among the best locally is the Fairport School District.

Practically every week there is some positive story about Fairport schools in the D&C.

Town Supervisors get a regular column in the weekly to tout themselves.

And in their spare time, the communications directors spew out newsletters, printed and distributed at public expense, explaining how wonderful their world is. Doesn’t hurt that the incumbents, especially if they are up for election, to get their name mentioned in these formats.

The opposition gets ignored as the community was always of one voice regardless of the issue - but there are never issues.

While as the new jargon says - the MSM (Main Stream Media) becomes less useful in learning about our community, the new media on the Internet, in words, images and video has the opportunity to fill the news gap.

So far there is little new media that even indirectly focuses on Pittsford. With this site our hope to fill some of the need. We are under no illusion that we have thousands or even hundreds of viewers.

But our goal is the make us a must read for everyone who is truly interested in Pittsford regardless of your political perspective. You might not like the implications but you will want to read us. RSS notification is available so when something new is posted, you can learn about it without having to check with the site periodically.

Yes, we are partisan. We will not be giving every side to every issue. We will not try.There will be separate articles and opinions and we will be fact checking. If we get a fact, wrong, let us know so that we can acknowledge our error and correct it.

Stay tuned.