Blue Hampshire

» see bluehampshire.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

New Hampshire holds about 1.3 million people and the first presidential primary in the country, which is the only reason a state political blog there could be read in Washington. Blue Hampshire went up in 2006 and spent the next two years sitting inside the most closely watched nominating contest in American politics. It was never going to be read anywhere else, and I am reading it now only because an archive kept a copy.

Dean Barker and Michael Caulfield started it with Laura Clawson. By November 2007 the Wall Street Journal was calling it a Democratic blog that had quickly become an influential voice in the New Hampshire primary campaign. A Republican former state legislator later described it without much grudge as a very effective site for people on the left who wanted to exchange ideas and get active.

The surest measure of its reach is who bothered to fake being a reader. Staffers from Hillary Clinton's campaign were caught creating pseudonymous accounts on it in 2007, and in 2011 an employee of the Republican office at the State House posed as a Democrat. A former state GOP political director had tried the honest version in 2009, launching RedHampshire as a conservative counterweight, and RedHampshire closed in 2011.

~ the case file ~

~ the death spiral post ~

Caulfield wrote the obituary himself, early, on his own blog. In August 2014 he posted under the heading "Blue Hampshire's Death Spiral" and described the front page as a ghost town. He put numbers on what he had walked away from: ten thousand posts and a hundred thousand comments, from a membership of five thousand. The co-founders had all drifted off around 2011, and he named December 2007 as one of the top months the site ever had.

What he was mourning in that post was not the traffic. It was the writing, seven years of argument about one state's politics, sitting on a platform nobody was tending.

~ the last page ~

The site kept answering for another eight months after he wrote that. The final version the Internet Archive holds is dated 4 April 2015, and its front page is given over to syndicated labor-union press releases filed the day before under somebody else's name. By 25 June 2015 the address returned a 404.

It answers again now, twice over. One form of the domain serves a blank hosting-panel default page and the other serves an Indonesian gambling site.

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