Political blog The Standard launches netroots interview series

For the first time in the history of New Zealand's blogosphere, premiere political blog thestandard.org.nz is interviewing the leaders of New Zealand's political parties, starting with The Progressives' Jim Anderton.

Two weeks ago The Standard opened up its comments section to public questions for the veteran politician to answer in his thread which was posted this morning.

A spokesperson for The Standard says the Interview the Leaders project is about closing the gap between the people who want to govern New Zealand and the people whose votes they want to win.

"The only chance many voters get to ask hard questions of political leaders are public meetings and we see this as a sort of virtual public meeting where anyone can ask anything in front of an audience of thousands of astute readers.

"While we are reliant on the leaders who participate in this project to get on board we are asking them to engage in the comments sections of their posts so we can get some real-time discussion going.

"We're really proud of the fact that we've got an audience of extremely politically informed readers and commenters from across the political spectrum and we're also pleased we can return their loyalty by giving them a chance to ask some tough questions of these leaders.

"We've seen politicians and candidates commenting on The Standard and other blogs and we believe this is just the next step in a process that will see more and more politicians turning to the blogosphere to reach politically-aware opinion leaders."

The Standard has been running for a little under a year now and has one of the largest readerships in New Zealand's political blogosphere.

The next leader to post on The Standard will be Jeanette Fitzsimons.

ENDS

The questions for Jim Anderton are:

Of which of your achievements in politics are you most proud?

From reader Daveo: Why should left-leaning NZers vote Progressive rather than Labour or Green?

From reader Gobbler: Can you demonstrate that Government investment in initiatives such as the 'jobs machine' the Ministry of Economic Development or New Zealand Trade and Enterprise generates a greater return to 'NZ inc' than say Government investment in a national fibre-optic network and additional overseas fibre optic cabling? - Just as one example…

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