Lamisi Dabire

This article was first published in a weekly staff newsletter of the Kettering Foundation. It describes my experience at forums held in Philadelphia as part of the work towards primaries for mayoral and city council elections. Even though the elections have been held, The Great Expectation Project is continuing with a civic-to-do list for the next mayor of Philadelphia. This is an interesting development for me, coming from an environment in newspapers that only report what has happened and do very little to set an agenda for public officials. This is an example of how a newspaper is setting agenda and creating space for citizens to dialogue.

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Residents of Philadelphia this week went to the primaries to elect a Democratic candidate for the mayor position as well as elect city councilors. These elections came after a highly intense process of engaging the candidates by residents and the media.

In December last year, the Philadelphia Inquirer under its “Great Expectation” project, organized a series of forums to find out what issues were going to take centre stage in the election primaries in the city. The residents identified violence and crime, education, jobs/economic development, taxes and housing.

As the political scene warms up in Ghana, many people are watching to see how sophisticated Ghanaians politicians will be this time round. As to whether the campaigning will take the same form of noisy rallies, promise mongering, indiscriminate postings of posters on walls, Radio, TV and newspaper advertisements as well as the usual euphoria that characterizes election campaigns or something totally different.

Already I see an improvement on the last election campaigns in 2004. While the New Patriotic Party (NPP) goes through the process of selecting a candidate for the 2008 elections, the National Democratic Congresses (NDC) presidential candidate Professor Evans Attah-Mills has kicked started his campaigns. Professor Mills seems to have a new appreciation for wooing voters. He is using door-to-door campaigns. That isn’t easy but likely to engage voters on a personal basis and perhaps win him some extra votes if the voters find his ideas plausible. I’ve read stories of Professor Mills becoming a foot soldier himself and interacting with people in places like Abossey Okai and he has plans of replicating it in other places across the country. That definitely looks like an innovation.

I discovered my love for the new media in Spokane. Even though I only spent two days with the Spokesman Review newspaper in Spokane, it made the most impression on me as far as doing journalism on the web is concern. This “spokesman review” is maximizing the potential of the Internet to stay in touch with her readers. I spend a day and half in Spokane interacting with reporters and editors. I sat through one of their daily editorial meetings which are screened live on the papers website, as part of its transparent newsroom project. The objective is to let the public know what the paper plans to work on for the next day. The idea is for them to make suggestions if any to these stories. Residents of Spokane can ask questions as to why a story was written in a particular way and also make suggestions or even report on issue themselves through their blogs.