Joe Shaw, good progressive that he is, might not appreciate that pun, but, hey, I like irony.

But what I really like is his approach to his new blog ocprogressive.com. 

Joe, who helped manage Debbie Cook’s unsuccessful campaign to unseat Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, co-created and launched the blog this week with Gus Ayer, a former Fountain Valley City Councilman and Heather Pritchard, a popular Daily Kos diarist. And while I may not always agree with the politics what I admire is that Shaw and his teammates are eager to do some of their own journalism instead of just commenting on someone else’s work and linking to it.

Too many blogs these days just deconstruct some news organization’s content and spew out a bunch of conspiracy theories. Most of the time I think, who cares what you think? And that’s because a lot of the bloggers aren’t very informed. I like the Atlantic bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, because they’re journalists and they have informed opinions when they comment on someone else’s work. That’s called perspective.

Also, Joe thinks his blog might be able to fill in where the mainstream media can’t. Unfortunately these days a lot of news organizations have had to cut back, like we have, and can’t get to every committee meeting or dig as deeply as we’d like to in some issues. But a blog like OC Progressive can do that. For instance, Ayer is writing a six-part series on “Orange County’s Failed Toll Road Experiment.” Much of the information will come from Ayer just digging into meeting minutes and other resources. With his background in government that’s a plus.

Shaw, interestingly enough, has a short journalistic background. He earned a degree in journalism from Cal State Los Angeles and got to work at a community newspaper in East LA where his job responsibilities, amazingly, included writing news articles and selling advertising. That’s a big no-no because it can lead some advertisers to figure you’ll take it easy on them if they happen to make negative news and they’ll expect positive coverage for non-news stories that amount to free advertising. The wall between advertising and editorial is supposed to be sacrosanct, but sadly it has eroded in recent years.

“There’s a need for some kind of in-depth reporting, particularly for the blogs in the Orange County area,” Shaw said, adding they’re too often not based on fact and more on opinion. “We don’t want to do that. We’d rather have real journalism as much as we can do.”

And with his background in journalism he’s well aware “you can just call people up and ask questions. That’s something a lot of bloggers don’t do. The difference between blogging and journalism is you actually have to do some work to get something to post. Blogs are so prevalent because it’s so easy.”

The OC Progressive team also aims to make it a participatory site like Daily Kos; anyone can jump in and start a diary. If it’s obscene or otherwise objectionable it’ll be dragged down as soon as possible.

Shaw, Ayer and Pritchard also hope to develop a “farm team” of progressive politicians in Orange County.

As for the politics, expect a lot of fact-based pragmatic solutions to problems. Shaw is clearly ticked off by ideologues who stubbornly cling to their politics at the expense of problem-solving.

“You don’t have to be a Democrat to be a progressive,” he notes. “There are Republicans out there like that, and they’re the kind of Republicans Orange County Republicans don’t like.”

Oh, and don’t be surprised if there’s a dash of snark in there.

“If there isn’t any snark in it … let’s face it, that’s what the most interesting blogs have,” Shaw said, laughing.

Maybe he won’t mind that pun, after all.

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