About Peter Schorsch, Executive Editor of SaintPetersblog and President of Extensive Enterprises Online, LLC

During the 2009 St. Petersburg Mayoral Campaign, when I published blog post after blog post about that election, I took note of a subtle trend in how visitors were arriving on my site. As much as I would have liked otherwise, many of my readers were not coming directly to Saint Petersblog, rather they were coming to the site after searching for a particular term in Google, Yahoo, etc. Yes, there was a base of regular readers who arrived on the site directly, but thousands of visitors were coming to the site after Googling terms associated with the St. Petersburg Mayoral Campaign: Bill Foster, Scott Wagman, Kathleen Ford, Deveron Gibbons, Rick Baker, etc.

Fast-forward to the 2012 Elections: Barack Obama. Mitt Romney. Herman Cain…Bill Nelson, Adam Hasner and George LeMieux…redistricting…competitive congressional and legislative races. Voters are hungry for information about all of this. Of course, they can turn to the mainstream media, but, as any blogger will tell you, the traditional media is no longer the end-all, be-all of political news coverage. The blogosphere and social networks are where the action is in 2012.

But how do readers get to the blogs, to Facebook pages of people they’ve never met, to Twitter messages from writers they don’t follow? The average voter, hungry for more information than what the St. Petersburg Times or Miami Herald offer, especially in this era of less coverage and more staff cuts, don’t know about Saint Petersblog or Sayfie Review.

But they should! I heard recently that the average American talks about politics four times more than they did a decade ago. This statistic tells me if people are talking about politics four times as much as they used to, they are probably reading about much more than they did ten years ago.

Voters are hungry for more information! That’s why, to satiate the hunger in Tampa Bay for more, if not better coverage of local and state politics, I launched a series of blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and websites.

These projects include Saint Petersblog, Battleground Tampa Bay, and Inside the Lines, blogs combining first-rate original content with news and information aggregated from many of Florida’s media outlets and social networks — all of it search engine optimized.

The mission of Extensive Enterprises is to provide the kind of in-depth analysis and on-the-ground coverage of the state, region, congressional, legislative and local political arenas which was once the hallmark of the so-called traditional media.

All of this is still a work in progress. Quite honestly, the technology behind the site — a comprehensive, customized WordPress template — is constantly being updated. So I am still learning about all of the site’s capabilities. But, I’ll tell you this, the content management system I am using is as good as any newspaper’s. In fact, when I showed former Tampa Tribune executive editor Janet Coats a prototype of this site, she wondered aloud why she shouldn’t move her newspaper’s entire online effort onto this type of system.

Each of the sites are optimized for advertising. I trust political campaigns — and those who want to influence them — will look to Extensive Enterprises as a cost-effective way to reach their targeted audience.

If you would like to discuss any of these projects further, please feel free to email me at saintpeter4@gmail.com.

Respectfully,

Peter Schorsch