Slugger O'Toole

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Slugger O'Toole is a weblog started in June 2002 by political analyst Mick Fealty. It began life as Letter to Slugger O'Toole, focused primarily on news and comment about Northern Ireland. From the beginning it has drawn its readership from a wide spectrum of opinion both inside and outside Northern Ireland.

Originally, it was a reference to a sockpuppet character invented by Tim Murphy of New York, on an old CNN community called Peace in Northern Ireland. Tim's "character" was invariably drunk on Bushmills and usually espoused strong loyalist politics, which often caught the unwary or recently arrived off guard. And he never listened to reasoned argument.

The idea of the Letter was to try to explain the complexities of Northern Ireland, slowly, regularly and in short bite size pieces over a long, long period of time. Just like trying to explain something complex to a drunk man. The name is originally from the traditional Irish song "The Irish Rover", best known as a collaboration between The Pogues and The Dubliners. The relevant line is: There was Slugger O'Toole who was drunk as a rule.

However the Letter part was dropped when the blog moved from its old blogspot venue and radically re-designed and built on a different blog platform.^[1] It has since been known as Slugger O'Toole, and in comments zone at least retaining some of the intractable qualities of Tim's old sockpuppet drunk.

[edit] Awards

• Shortlisted for Politics Online's "The Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics" 2006.^[2]
• "Best Website of the Month" and specially commended in the "Website of the Year Award" at the BT GoldenEye T Awards in May 2006.
• First in the "Best Political Blog" section in the Dublin based Irish Blog Awards in 2006.
• In 2005 it won "Best European Political Weblog" in the first Satin Pajamas competition held by Fistful of Euros. [1].
• It won the New Statesman "New Media Award" for community and information in 2004.^[3]

[edit] References