About

Who are you?

We’ve a collective who saw a gap in the New Zealand political blogosphere and decided that we should have a go at filling it here at The Standard blog site. We write here in our personal capacities and the opinions that are expressed on the blog are individual. We do not write on behalf on any organization.

Why “The Standard”?

The Standard newspaper - from where our masthead comes - was founded by labour movement activists in the 1930s. They used it as a vehicle to share their views with a broader audience - a perspective they felt the mainstream media was representing poorly. We think the same is true today.

What’s your political ‘angle’?

We come from a variety of backgrounds and our political views don’t always match up but it’d be fair to say that all of us share a commitment to the values and principles that underpin the broad labour movement and we hope that perspective will come through strongly as you read the blog.

Why don’t you say who you are?

We choose to blog anonymously for a variety of reasons. Some of us have professional reasons for doing so, others of us are reluctant to expose ourselves to the kind of personal threats sometimes made online. We discussed this issue long and hard before we began and came down on the side of anonymity. We hope you can see why. You might also want to contemplate the implications of this link.

If you want to get hold of us, have a look on the Contact Page.

Who pays for this?

We do, but in the spirit of a collective endeavour we get help from time to time from a range of people from the labour movement whose technical skills we couldn’t do without. Thanks guys!

The current cost of the site (at the time of writing) is $160+GST per month and the cost of a domain name per year. It is paid by the sysop (Lynn Prentice) as part of his contribution to the site.

The monthly cost is probably higher than most NZ blog sites. The sysop likes having complete control on the site for both security and reliability reasons. The site is hosted in NZ where most of the traffic comes from, has command-line shell and lower level control on the system.  This also helps with managing the continually increasing traffic on the site.

Are you getting rich from blogging?

Nope. We don’t make any money out of blogging here, and you’ll notice we don’t even run ads. We do this purely because we enjoy it and we think the labour movement side of the story is always worth re-telling.

Why don’t you post more often/more regularly etc?

None of us are full-time bloggers. We have jobs and families and other interests, one or two of us even have girlfriends/boyfriends. We hope you like reading our blog site but we try not to let it run our lives. If you have an idea for a post we’re happy for you to let us know though.

I have an idea/comment/suggestion, how can I contact you?

Send us an email: We can’t reply to everything and, as above, sometimes have other priorities but we do appreciate hearing from you.

No - you must….

Have you read this page? We must do nothing. The posters post on the topics they want to (with a few limitations from the sysop). If you really absolutely want your ideas to be heard, then start a blog and start learning to write. You can probably find a more compatible blog on our blogroll. Or you can comment on the posts that our posters write and follow our rather lenient rules.