In Sunday's paper, the Palladium-Item endorsed Sally Hutton as its candidate of choice for Mayor, saying that candidate Rick Thalls had "demonstrated an insufficient grasp of the issues most germane to Richmond's future." Later that same day, Rick Thalls` campaign apparently withdrew from the blogging experiment on the paper's website (discussed in our most recent episode), removing all of his postings from the blog without any explanation. When contacted about the withdrawal, "Thalls said he moved his posts to his Web site because of the conduct of one of our forums users," according to Online editor Jason Truitt. As yet, we have not been able to confirm that the text available on the Thalls campaign website is an unaltered version of what appeared on the Pal-Item site; such verification may be difficult without an archive for comparison.

The blog on the Pal-Item site was already a little non-traditional: user comments were disabled, and feedback was directed to a detached forum thread that didn't have any real structure to it. The candidates were also allowed to edit and refine posts as they pleased, and did so. This withdrawal of content by the Thalls campaign, even if done so as a result of concerns about user responses, is not in keeping with the whole point of blogging in this context - carrying on a conversation in response to the feedback received. Any future posts by the campaign may now be met with the skepticism about whether or not the content will live through any critique. Further, the timing of the withdrawal couldn't be worse; the appearance is wholly that the campaign was sore about the paper's endorsement, and chose to pack up its toys and go home, instead of using the prominent medium available to respond.