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The Blogosphere Next Door
Constituent connections the goal for Gur Tsabar and Room Eight

By Lee Norsworthy

Gur Tsabar’s is a familiar face in the basement of City Hall. A weathered staffer and former Democratic City Council candidate, he has spent long hours in the infamous Room Nine, where generations of reporters have come face to face with generations of politicians.

This past March, Tsabar, along with well-known political blogger Ben Smith, launched Room Eight (www.r8ny.com), Room Nine’s virtual neighbor, where a new generation of citizen-journalists would shake new life into the state political sphere.

A “quarter-life crisis” sent Tsabar to New York, soul-searching capital of the world. Here, he dabbled in reporting and bartending on his way to the public sector.

The wandering bartender responded to a job posting, and was hired as a legislative aide to then-Council Member Eva Moskowitz (D-Manhattan). In two months, he was promoted to chief of staff, where he spent a year lobbying to direct federal funding in the city’s low-income school districts, among other projects.

Tsabar met Gifford Miller (D-Manhattan) during the Council member’s campaign for speaker, and joined his team as senior policy and communications advisor. He spent four years in that position, but as his frustration with the state of New York City politics mounted, he decided to run for Council himself in 2005, for the seat then held by term-limited Margarita López (D-Manhattan).

“After five years behind the scenes,” he said, “you start to see what you like and what you don’t like.”

A campaign based on the idea of providing increased, consistent constituent services earned the dark horse candidate several surprise endorsements, including those of The New York Times, Daily News, and Amsterdam News. Tsabar far surpassed his own goal of knocking on 10,000 doors. He proposed to hold office hours in buildings throughout the district on evenings and weekends. He made himself known by mobilizing community service efforts including clothing and cell phone drives.

After Rosie Mendez won the Council primary (Tsabar placed third), Tsabar’s self-proclaimed “slow down period” had him spending days poring over political blogs like Daily Kos, Gothamist and the Politicker. Then, mutual friend Andrew Rasiej (D), who had just finished his own unsuccessful campaign for public advocate centered on using technology to improve citizen involvement in government, approached Smith and Tsabar. He proposed a “voice of the people site,” which eventually grew into Room Eight.

On March 28, Smith introduced Room Eight to readers of the Politicker as a conversation forum for people who care about New York politics.

“And it didn’t hurt,” Smith wrote of the blog’s title, “that the Eighth Circle of Hell is the one Dante uses to hold politicians.”

“It started as a project and has backed itself into a little bit more of an enterprise,” said Tsabar.

To get the site off the ground, Tsabar and Smith recruited some of the Politicker’s heaviest bloggers, some known and some anonymous, including Jerry Skurnick, Rock Hackshaw, and of course, EnWhySeaWonk. In just over four months, the site now attracts between 2,000 and 3,000 unique visitors a day (no small feat for a new site, though blogs like the Daily Kos average 600,000 unique visitors a day).

But Tsabar said he does not inject his own very strong views into anything about the site, for which he shares publishing duties with Smith. “We have no influence over content, and proudly,” he said.

Tsabar describes Smith’s Politicker as “grandfather” of the group. While Room Eight is unique in its statewide coverage, it also raises questions as to the future of the blogosphere.

Thanks to a grant from the Sunlight Foundation – a Washington-based watchdog designed to harness the Internet to promote transparency in Congress – Room Eight is able to pay a fraction of its bloggers for entries, blurring the conceptual hyphen in the new and quickly expanding category of citizen-journalists.

“The days of free quality content will be short lived,” said Tsabar, who hopes that through grants and advertisers, the site will continue to pay writers because, he added, in the competition for eyeballs, content always wins.