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Is there a link between money for the mayor’s website and the Vision-defending blog Civicscene.ca?

September 12th, 2010 · 106 Comments

I wanted to be able to think for 10 minutes before plunging into this mess and I have now. I don’t claim to have found the light at the end of the tunnel, but at least I’ve had a bit more time to reflect and make some preliminary phone calls.

So, for those of you not tuned in elsewhere, here is the precis:

Alex Tsakumis, the blogger who is rapidly making it his full-time career to dig up damaging stuff about Vision, obtained the following documents.

1. A proposal from FD Element, a company that does communications/political/media work for various outlets from Queen’s University to the David Suzuki Foundation, on July 6, 2009, to redo Mayor Gregor Robertson’s “About” page on the city website for $14,500.

2. A counter-proposal from Robertson’s chief of staff, Mike Magee, dated Aug. 19, 2009, to do something different, not a redesign of the About page, but a new web page and mayor’s blog, which he pegs at $27,500.

3. A contract with Jonathan Ross, dated April 20, 2009, that agrees to pay him $500 for 10 hours of online marketing work, and then a subsequent contract with Ross dated May 25, 2009, that agrees to pay him $50 an hour for something called “conversation mining.”

4. An invoice to FD Element from an outfit called Tommy Media (clearly a web design outfit) for $730 worth of work on civicscene.ca, the blog that Jonathan Ross started up last summer that is clearly intended to provide counterspin to the citycaucus blog run by NPAers Daniel Fontaine and Mike Klassen, and another $60 charge for one year’s worth of hosting services for civicscene.ca.

I’ve talked to Ross and the mayor’s office and received an email from Don Millar of FD Element confirming that all of these documents are real, none are fakes or have been altered in any way.

Tsakumis’ conclusions, sort of echoed by citycaucus although with some cautions (Mike Klassen got $24,000 from Sam Sullivan to design and run his website over three years, so he’s a bit hesitant about throwing rocks on this one) , are that the mayor’s office clearly pumped up its website contract in order to secretly fund Ross’s blog; ergo, taxpayer dollars are being used to run a partisan political blog.

Both mainstream and alternative media are circling around this one, not completely sure what to do about it. Unlike the radio clip that West End Neighbours came up with that had the mayor calling them “f’ing hacks,” these documents put a lot of smell around the mayor’s office and Ross but don’t nail the coffin lid quite as tightly as that tape did.

Here are my thoughts on all of this and, before I start, I know already some people would wonder why I am giving attention to something on a blog from someone clearly ready to believe any smear about the political party he happens to hate the most today. (I do believe Alex is non-partisan in the sense that he is eventually turns against everyone, except, to this point, Tony Parsons.)

1. The number one rule in journalism is that everyone who coughs up information has an agenda. They may want to make themselves look good; they may have it in for someone. You can’t judge information by the agenda of the person who has it; you have to judge it by whether it’s newsworthy.

2. This kind of information leakage and dynamic is marks an escalation of dirty-tricks political campaigning that is undoubtedly going to go on all this year. This is the first time I can recall that documents between private companies and individuals, as opposed to internal city documents, have been leaked out to the public in a civic campaign — an act of industrial espionage that tops any previous records.

So we had better all get used to what’s going on and figure out how every one of is going to handle it. (I’m not saying that it was Scouts’ rules until now. The evolution from just the previously genteel capitalist/socialist bashing began with the 2005 campaign.  Jamie Lee Hamilton accusing Vision mayoral candidate Jim Green of something or other nefarious and the James Green/Jim Green debacle were departures from all previous campaigns. The 2008 campaign, where Vision Vancouver benefited from well-timed leaks, accusations, and news conferences about Olympic village financial problems, was the next stage.)

So what do I think about all this?

– There’s no hard evidence to me that there’s some kind of bogus inflation of the bill. The original proposal was to fix up the mayor’s “about” page, the information that appears on the city website. But the subsequent August message has changed the scope of work, to have a fancy page for the mayor that was not the “about” page, as in the original proposal, but a new website with video. It doesn’t seem out of line that that would cost $27,000, given the bells and whistles on the site — or what it costs for a simple bathroom update these days. I’d need to talk to website-production companies to get a sense of whether this is a reasonable price. (Though I do think they could try to get the dates to line up with the picture frames on the site for that price.) Mike Klassen of Citycaucus says his sources say it’s high, but somehow I don’t feel I can rely on that information.

– NPA Councillor Suzanne Anton (not Citycaucus, as I wrote earlier) have suggested that it’s outrageous that the mayor should pay for an independent contractor to do this when the city’s in-house communications department could do it. One, I believe that’s against city policy. The communications department provides a basic service with description information for the mayor and councillors on the city’s site. If a council member wants to link a personal site to their “about” site, they have to do it on their own. And somehow I don’t think that critics would be any happier if the internal communications department was spending $27,000 worth of time on designing the mayor’s site.

– Should the mayor, using his discretionary fund, be allowed to spend this kind of money on websites that look an awful lot like personal promotion? I think that’s something there should be more discussion about and bipartisan agreement. Sam Sullivan’s people can’t put $24,000 into a website through untendered contracts to Mike Klassen (who knows, maybe someone could have done it cheaper than him?) and then gripe about Vision’s bill. And vice versa, when Vision loses out some day to some future mayoral candidate.

On to Jonathan Ross and his blog

– The contracts between FD Element and Ross don’t definitively prove anything. I have to say when I saw “conversation mining,” I didn’t know what it was, it sounded nefarious, and I sent off my editor a note immediately saying “We have to look into this.” Since then, I’ve discovered that conversation mining is a pretty common term in the social media world. It means tracking trends in public conversations about your company, mostly by looking at blog and website comments and what Google turns up. If you google the phrase, you come up with any number of hits like this one. I called Ross, who phoned me back from Toronto about this. He says that contract was for conversation mining for some of FD’s clients in the States, one gold company, another on environmental issues.

He says these aren’t the only contracts he’s had with FD. He’s had about four in total, including one to translate some documents from English to Punjabi.

I do have to wonder why the contracts don’t specify which clients the work is for. Whenever I submit an invoice or sign a contract to do a piece of work, it’s spelled out (number of words, topic, main themes, due date) what I’ll be working for.

But just because Ross does sub-contracting work for FD doesn’t automatically and without any need for further proof mean that he is connected to Vision work. I understand that Councillor Anton’s son worked for FD a couple of years ago.

– The most problematic document is the invoice for Civicscene.ca from Tommy Media, one for $730 in time — clearly to set up the blog — and $60 for the first year’s hosting bill.

Ross says that he asked FD Element to help him find a web designer to set up his new Civicscene blog last July and that FD did, paid the bill and charged it back against other work he was doing for them.

That sounds like a strange and complicated way to do business. Also, Ross’s website for his communications/political strategy/media company, TDH Strategies, says that he doesn’t do website work himself but has strong relationships with companies that do.

(From his website, the following:

Q.  Can TDH Strategies design a website like this one for me?

A.  While web design is not a core service, the TDH Strategies website was done internally and therefore the answer is absolutely.  Not only has TDH Strategies completed contracts for companies involved in domain development and online marketing, as well as for Internet start-ups, the company has established professional relationships with several web designers.  Once again of interest, the pricing for this endeavour is quite economical.)

On the other hand, if FD and Ross were trying to keep all of this so secret by making sure there were no references to a blog or Civicscene or Vision on any of the contracts between FD and Ross, why would this piece of work be so casually open?

Here are the official statements.

Don Millar at FD Element:

As a matter of company policy we do not discuss the details of client engagements.  We do, however, confirm that we have an on-going business relationship with Jonathan Ross and TDH Strategies that has involved work across a number of client engagements.  This is completely separate from our firm’s work for the City of Vancouver, including the Mayor’s office.

The mayor’s office: “Any assertions that money going from FD to pay for Jonathan Ross are false. They are very serious allegations about the misuse of taxpayers money and they are wrong.”

Ultimately, the conclusion I have to draw is: I don’t know. It doesn’t look good. There’s no definitive proof FD was paying Ross to run the Civicscene blog. There’s no definitive proof they weren’t. There’s also no definitive proof that Mike Klassen is running Citycaucus for no money and no definitive proof that he isn’t, though he doesn’t have any dangling invoices out there with Reputations or the Pace Group (two PR companies that previously worked with the NPA and/or Mayor Sam Sullivan) that we know of.

It doesn’t make sense to me in either case that they’re working for free. These are young guys. Mike has a family to support. I don’t know what Jonathan’s family situation is. Both claim they’re spending 10-15 hours a week on their blogs for no money. Maybe I only feel this way because I’m 55 and don’t have the stamina any more, but I don’t see how you can put in two full days of work a week for free when you’re trying to run careers. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if private backers or the individual parties were paying for their time.

One final thought on the specifics of this. Mike said Ross’s previous attack on West End Neighbours’ spokesman Randy Helten is reprehensible if Ross is getting taxpayer money funnelled to him from Vision for the blog. (Civicscene asked all kinds of coy questions about whether Helten’s family owned condos near the controversial tower that Helten has been opposing.)

I disagree. Ross’s unpleasant post was reprehensible even if he didn’t get a dime from Vision or the taxpayers. It’s clear that Ross gets loads of inside city-hall information from Vision and has a history of affiliations with them on various campaigns and issues. Given that, whether he claims to be independent or not, it felt like a Vision-inspired smear on Randy. It’s just bad politics for any party, particularly a governing party, to go after citizens protesting their policies.

On a final note, there is a troubling trend here and that’s this. Leakers of anti-Vision information are now choosing not to go to anyone in the mainstream media at all with their information these days, not even those who are from time to time labelled as “crackerjack” reporters because of their willingness to follow anti-Vision blog stories.

That says two things to me: Those leakers don’t even want reporters designated as sympathetic to know who they are and they don’t want the scrutiny that would be the norm at any mainstream outlet.

Instead, they place their information in blogs where there are lower standards of proof. Then a second, similarly aligned blog picks it up.Then the mainstream media, in a quandary these days about all of this, feel compelled to do some kind of story, even if it’s only “blogs are reporting that …” In the end, everything becomes a rumour mill where some believe where there’s smoke, there’s fire and others believe that everything is unsubstantiated smell that’s being put around the person they happen to believe in.

I know exactly what a certain group of disgruntled media critics are going to say. It’s because all you MSM journalists are so lazy. All the good information is coming from blogs these days because they’re willing to make the effort.

It’s true that one person or a group that is really passionate about an issue can dig up a lot more information than a journalist who’s flying from assignment to assignment. The reality is that, in short-staffed newsrooms, reporters everywhere rely on the community to be their eyes and ears. I know I couldn’t make it a day without the dozens of people who pass on to me what they are discovering about city hall, their neighbourhood, their party.

But the problem with passionate bloggers and community groups is those people are often unwilling to listen to counter-arguments and quick to jump on what they want to believe is true. Sometimes they find gold. Sometimes they really flub it.

(I note that Alex, in a previous smoking-gun post, was convinced that Bob Rennie had a secret plan to sell off all the 49 rental units in Millennium’s Bidwell tower — the ones the city was supposedly giving extra density for — because he talked to some junior staffer at Rennie’s whose last name he didn’t get and she told him that the company wouldn’t have any rentals, that they would sell all the units and it was up to owners to decide if they wanted to rent. But Alex didn’t notice that the number of units Rennie was marketing matched the number of private condos the building had always been planned to have; nor did he notice that Rennie’s doesn’t have a property-management licence, so it wouldn’t legally be allowed to handle the rental units. Oops.)

Sometimes those passionate groups or individuals can be manipulated by others who don’t really care that much about their issue but are using their passions as a weapon in another war.

I love the new journalism world in some ways because it’s made my reporting better. Like all journalists, I have to work fast, I take certain things on trust, I sometimes repeat mistakes that have become embedded in journalism histories. So it has helped me when readers have pointed out my flubs and reminded me that I need to put more work into checking out a particular version of history.

But I also am worried about a world where journalists are dismissed as useless because they don’t happen to buy in fully to every citizen group’s version of reality. I also don’t want to live in a world where information is nothing more than individual groups coming up with attack material on whomever they have it in for at the moment. We need to find a way where we can agree on what the test is for believable information. Community groups working with journalists, trained in checking for certain levels of proof, could be the powerful new journalism of the future.

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