Seattle Councilmember Jan Drago may not be officially announcing her Candidacy for the Mayor of Seattle until Tuesday after the 3-day Memorial Day weekend, but that still didn't stop her campaign from gearing up with tests of their new @JanDrago4Mayor twitter feed Friday afternoon. The 'test tweets' posted to a brand new account around 6-7pm Friday, just as the Mariners were warming up for a wild game against the Giants which went into extra-innings (Mariners won in the 12th btw), traffic was backed up with people pouring out of town for the holidays (5hr delay on I-90), and the general media was going into a 3-day slow-news-slumber (for example: I was at a bar for post-GonzoCamp 'discussion' when the @JanDrago4Mayor feed went live).With this crazy weekend ahead of us, surely nobody would notice that 'Councilmember' Drago, who as of a week ago has only "filed a C-1 candidate registration form for a an (sic) Exploratory Committee for Mayor with the PDC and Ethics and Elections." Seattle Times had released a short blurb two hours earlier saying Drago was going to announce her candidacy on Tuesday at the Seattle Art Museum, by the Hammering Man. This location would make sense for the Councilwoman to announce her candidacy since Drago is known for pushing forward pro-business initiatives and 'supporting the worker', for whom the Gotham City-like Hammering Man was commissioned to celebrate.
However, with a 4-days-early account registration and the postings of her campaign twitter feed to the public sphere, Jan Drago has not only managed to upstage herself, but through a technicality has announced her Candidacy for Mayor via Twitter. It's a stretch, I know, but aren't you supposed to announce you're running before putting out campaign content? With her new twitter feed already following close to 50 people, Jan Drago is already public with her intention to run for Mayor.
Johnathon Fitzpatrick can be contacted at 678-485-4609
or email:JohnathonFitz@hotmail.com
and on twitter: @JJtweets
Grumblings were heard on @westseattleblog twitter feed later complaining about news sources repeatedly breaking an Embargo, which is an agreement between a source and a news distributor to hold the release of information until a set date and time.
ReplyDeleteThe agreement is like music stores being allowed to possess but are still 'Embargoed' from selling the newest Green Day album until exactly midnight of the CD release date.
This could mean that Drago requested the press hold off on reporting her announcement until Tuesday so she wouldn't be upstaged. I haven't read the release but this is a fairly common practice so that the Press knows where to go for 'breaking' stories.
It seems there will be great pressure to break those embargoes these days, given the constant and persistent beast the news cycle has become. Funny, though -- the "official" announcement seems like little more than a photo op, given that Drago's candidacy is pretty common knowledge.
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