In a blog post that references the "media elite" and last week's alcohol-fueled Open Source Media party in Manhattan, blogger Scott Sala of SlantPoint makes an impassioned case for blogging about local - not national - politics:

"...I have no interest in hobnobbing with the blog elite - though free top shelf liquor is always welcome. I've been heartily engaged in local politics because I see that the true citizen journalism frontier, where change can be made and stardom is not a primary goal...

Somewhere post-Bush43-squared I lost the mission. National political blogging was saturated and amounted to a lot of blathering and repetition, and a whole load of the top tier hunkering down and elbowing out the rest. It got predictable. I began to cite the source of 2nd, 3rd and 4th tier bloggers simply on content - that's from Drudge, that's from Malkin, that's from Glenn...

The local stuff is so much more the Wild West of blogging with a mission that is in your face. The people you write about meet you. The feedback is greater. The field is WIDE WIDE open. And frankly, in my position, the battle is very uphill (a Republican in NYC) - and I like it like that...

This isn't a hobby. This is a fight. I'm not an objective journalist, but an online activist. I ride the phantom line between journalism and advocacy, not quite an op-ed writer, but a digital evangelist in a strange land."

(Hat tip: The Politicker)