It’s hard to remember, but in those days, no one cared about city hall. It used to be me and a couple of Chinese-language-media reporters who would hang out in the pews at city council chambers on Tuesdays. When I went to the committee meetings on Thursday, I was usually the only reporter there. People coming to speak to council issues sometimes thought I was the recording secretary. And it was like that for quite a long time. Years and years, really, although Allen Garr started writing for the Courier after a while so then there was, thankfully, one more person.

This week in Vancouver, when city hall was stuffed like a turkey with news — the budget, cracking down on crummy SROs, whether to allow mixed martial arts events, police budgets being wrecked by gang investigations, Councillor Suzanne Anton grilling the mayor like he was a naughty boy about campaign financing — there were as many reporters and outlets covering the events as at any session of the provincial legislature. When Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts gave her annual addresss to the Board of Trade out there a couple of weeks ago, it was covered like it was a throne speech.

The change started in Vancouver, of course, with the surprise election of Larry Campbell and COPE in 2002, the first of the signs that, with the Liberals in charge in Victoria, the left was going to concentrate its efforts at other levels. The ongoing battle for power between the two major, now more equal, parties and the big issues the city has had to tackle have kept the interest going. But in other municipalities, upsets by new mayors — Dianne Watts in Surrey, Pam Goldsmith-Jones in West Van in 2005; and then Rick Green in Langley, Ernie Daykin in Maple Ridge and Richard Stewart in Coquitlam in 2008 — make it clear that people are paying attention to civic politics and are ready for change. They’re also ready to boot people out the minute they think they’re not performing.

And this is even though big media haven’t always been that interested in civic politics lately. Unlike in the 1980s, when the city hall “press room” routinely had camera crews hanging around and a paper like the Vancouver Sun had not one but two city-hall reporters plus usually a columnist covering city issues, the bigger TV and print don’t always have even one person assigned to the beat any more.

The community newspapers, which are not suffering at all from the same kind of “what do we do now” angst of the big metro dailies, have helped fill that void will their increasingly strong coverage. As well, the surge of interest in civic politics in blog world has also moved in to fill the gap.

It’s kind of weird but provincial politics hasn’t produced anywhere near the kind of blogging that we’re seeing on the municipal level. Bill Tieleman runs the most aggressive blog in covering provincial issues and a few others comment, but really, a lot of the energy is way more local. I keep puzzling over why that is — as the world gets more complicated, it’s easier to focus on the local stuff because we can understand it? where we live right here seems more important these days than out there? Or we now see ourselves more as from our neighbourhoods than as Canadians or BCers?

Jordan Bateman, whose Langley politics blog used to be the main read out there (and an informed one, since he’s a councillor and former newspaper reporter), has seen three other blogs on Langley politics pop up in the last while. Paul Hillsdon keeps up on stuff in Surrey; there’s a North Van politics blog; and, of course, here in Vancouver, there seems to be a new blog every couple of months: me, Mike Howell at the Courier, Charlie Smith at the Georgia Straight, Christine Montgomery at the Province for a while until recently, the two former Sam Sullivan aides, Daniel Fontaine and Mike Klassen at citycaucus.com, and many others (sorry if I didn’t mention you all by name).

That’s all a good thing, I hope, because it turns out that it actually makes a difference to the political process when there are eyes watching and people talking about what happens. In Russell Smith’s lovely column in the Globe recently, where he was talking about how much he loves newspapers (oh, yes, the feel of them and the sense of connectedness to the world), he pointed out that, when newspapers die, it has a direct impact on local politics and how engaged people are in them.

So, even though I now can’t get a seat at the media table these days if I come late to council, and it feels sometimes like everyone is falling over each other to get the latest little tidbit from the city, it’s okay — and even kind of fun — that it’s crowded.

Along with that has been a not coincidental, I think, stream of stories from MSM journalists unhappy about the level of discourse that seems to have come with the rise of the webosphere. Judith Timson in the Globe had a column last Saturday about how web commenting is the new blood sport. The Globe’s health writer, Andre Picard, also had one during the week, looking at how the Internet and the nasty conversations on it are having an impact on science and health. Those are just two of the more prominent ones I noted, but they add to a growing concern about what the new form of journalism is going to be.

It’s a strange time for me to watch this. I teach a course in the history of journalism and so I know that the constant in the business is the level of manic change. And I straddle two universes. I still work in MSM and I also blog. I like both worlds. MSM journalism, at its best, means really devoting yourself to trying to tell a complete story, with all that that demands in the way of rigorously searching out information and distilling it to something coherent for readers.

But the blog world is great too. For me and for many of my MSM friends, it’s been a revelation to be able to have a dialogue with readers that goes far beyond the usual “Here’s my story, what do you think of it?” exchange in MSM. As one of my friends said recently, “It makes me feel like I really understand all the people out there who have been reading my stories all these years. Now I get to hear from them. The problem with most of us is that we only know a limited circle of people and we think everyone thinks like us. But this puts me in touch with whole different worlds.” I know I feel that way, too, and I feel privileged, for the most part, to have such interesting people commenting on my blog.

But there is another side to WebWorld that bothers me, and both Judith’s and Andre’s columns struck a chord as a result.

One is the abuse that gets heaped on journalists who do not write the story that certain readers think should be written. I have really noticed this recently, as people have dumped on me via web for not sufficiently crucifying people like Paul Haden or Judy Rogers or the Maleks. It’s just so puzzling to me. I went into journalism because people interest me and I want to know more about them, good and bad. When I was a kid, I was dying to know what was going on behind every picture window on our block. When you decide you’re going to make a villain of someone, you run the risk of blinding yourself to parts of their story. But it seems as though, in this increasingly partisan world, if you try to write that more balanced, more open story, you’re seen as a dupe, a wimp, a shill.

The other part of the new web journalism that disturbs me is the lack of any kind of standards when it comes to disseminating “facts” and opinions. I know people like to imagine that MSM journalists have no standards, that they’ll print every scurrilous thing that crosses their desk. I just wish all the conspiracy theorists could spend time in a good newsroom, where reporters often turn down dozens of stories of alleged wrongdoing in a month. Why? Because they actually try to check them out, see if they can verify whether any of the information is true, sort out people’s imperfect understandings of how the bureaucracy works and see what still holds water — and only when they can be assured that there’s some validity to they start shaping it into a story.

But out there in WebWorld, people think it’s good enough to BELIEVE something is true — without actually doing the hard work of checking anything — to put it out there as a fact. My friend who loves her new blog world is also disturbed by the conversations she has with some posters who don’t get why they can’t post libellous comments about people using their real names, without providing a shred of documentation.

I’d like to think that, out of the tectonic shifts now reshaping traditional journalism, that we come out with a kind of information sharing that is better. It’s not a bad idea for reporters to have a dialogue with people in the community about how they do their jobs and to accept their input about what’s a story and whose point of view should be included. But I sometimes worry that it’s going to be much worse and than, in 10 years, when the MSM media are dead and buried, information and news will consist of isolated groups of people all screaming out their distorted version of the truth only to each other.