At a Labour New Media breakfast yesterday, which gave a really interesting insight into how Labour hope to change their campaigning to make the most of the new environment. Also the launch of LabourList, and a chance to witness a broad section of the left blogohemisphere’s ecosystem – which I think is a post in itself.

There was a big distraction (well, enough to distract me) at the event though in the shape of an article from the Guardian, alleging LabourList editor Derek Draper was fudging the origins of his psychotherapy qualifications (studying in Berkeley, but not at Berkeley. David Hencke wrote it up, on a tip off from top right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes. Toddler-induced router damage prevented me from sticking this post up last night, and Roy ‘Splitter’ Greenslade has beaten me to much of the point.

Like Roy, I’m a big admirer of David Hencke, a journalist with a refreshingly open and uncynical outlook and a dogged investigator who has brought out some of the best that New Media has to offer the Guardian. From being spiked regularly after the Berliner edition cut the serious pages, Hencke discovered you can be every bit as effective a journalist through the spike-proof media of blogs and podcasts, building up stories that become so important that they force their way back into the dead-tree version.

There’s a big danger here in mainstream media being so plugged into New Media though. Much of political blogging is just process stuff – who did what to whom and what they said about it – and too little is actually policy, which ultimately matters far more to real politics. This is partly because the former is easier to do, and appeals to the prurient tribalist in many of us (myself most definitely included).

Every time Guido breaks a story, mainstream media must fume a little that they missed out on it, regardless of how good it was. Guido doesn’t operate to print cycles, and there’s a lot of pressure on editors to move fast to keep up with him and his ilk.

Now, urgent stories are good, important stories are +good, but the ++good stories are both important and urgent. Problem is, most of these blog gossip stories are just the first type, and would have been confined to msm diary pieces in the past, but the blogohype combined with the rush-on as print deadlines loom gets them confused with something more important, and they push out more serious stuff from the limited column inches available.

So in lieu of a story on politicians seriously trying to understand and engage with a radically different political landscape (which doesn’t really fit the current irrelevance-of-politicians narrative), we get a puffed up diary story, and the Guardian gets inadvertantly involved in a spoiler story. This isn’t public service journalism. Guido Fawkes may not care about that, but the Guardian really should.

Anyway, everyone seems to be friends again today, though I’m not sure how much that is down to Derek’s reaction of reaching for the lawyers. As much as the Guidoisation of mainstream media priorities is damaging, legal threats are an old media technique that really grates with New Media too. It’s difficult for Derek I’ll admit, as this story was damaging to his profession outside politics rather than to his blogging, but is being used because of the political context. Again though, I’d warn against setting Schillings on anyone – it really won’t do any favours with networks he wants to form online.

This all detracts severely from a pretty admirable achievement, which is that Derek has in the space of only a month, and in the face of sustained trolling, personal insults and attempts to undermine him, established LabourList as a pretty credible new Labour blog, that fills a definite gap for the left.

Yesterday’s other dead-tree reaction, from that other friend of the left, the Daily Mail, was at least on topic, but a bit wide of the mark. It seems to refer more to the site in its first weeks, when postings were few and far between, rather than the current beast which has such a well-stuffed RSS feed I can’t read it on the poxy low-memory phone I’m reduced using to whilst mine is in (toddler-induced) repair. It seems to take issue mainly though with Labour cheerleading on the site, which frankly is what I’d like to see a bit of on a blog like this. Oops, and I’ll confess to actually having been interested in the lampooned headline “Where exactly should social media fall in the organizational structure?” (blushes).