The Dale Plan for "rescuing" political blogging

Iain Dale thinks he’s riding to the rescue of British political blogging:

I think the way forward for mass audience blogs is with group blogs. To that effect in a few weeks I am launching a new multi-authored site provisionally called Iain Dale & Friends. It won’t have an editorial line, it won’t be politically partisan, and it will cover culture, the media and sport as well as core UK and world politics. I’ve recruited 40 or 50 friends to write for the site.

My experience is that group blogs are significantly harder to make work that individual blogs, as I mentioned here. That’s not to say that Dale’s enterprise won’t work – Samizdata is an example of a long-running, successful group political blog, for example – but the challenges may be much greater than he expected.

Personally, I suspect the decline in political blogging, such as it is, is around the change of government. It is, after all, the first time that has happened in the life of the UK blogosphere. The blogs of the right are more muted now that their lot are in power, and the blogs of the left have yet to really take on board the fact that they lost the election. The ones I read seem to think that the Coalition will collapse at any second, and that Labour will return to its natural position in government Real Soon Now. Once they get through this denial and the other stages of grief, I expect they’ll start growing a bit more vigourously.