CORRECTION APPENDED
DENVER -- The Democratic National Convention Committee issued credentials to 124 bloggers this year -- a record number, but still just a fraction of the estimated 10,000 or so media camped out in four enormous tents in the parking lot of the Pepsi Center.
But the real action is several blocks away in the two-story "
Big Tent," located in a downtown historic district with plenty of nightlife. There, several hundred bloggers (of 3,000 who applied) have paid $100 each for a spot at a table or couch, wireless Internet, the chance of electricity (there's never enough) two meals a day and all the free
microbrewed beer they want.
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Paul Krugman, John Podesta and Arianna Huffington |
This week, this is the national headquarters of the blogosphere. All day and into the night, these 500 or so bloggers pore over their laptops, watch television and produce news and commentary that is independent, but not entirely divorced from, the mainstream/legacy/establishment media. (There are several terms, but they all mean the same thing: the companies with the printing presses and the satellite trucks.)
"We're in a very different place than we were in 2004. No longer is it bloggers vs. old media," said Arianna Huffington in an interview. With major news organizations blogging, and bloggers doing original reporting, "it's much more of a convergence."
Huffington Post, of course, is well represented here. In the building next to the Big Tent, the Huffington Oasis is a chill, dark sanctuary where a man and a woman practice
AcroYoga, two women offer free massages next door and you can't help but feel like the uncoolest person in the room.
Back in the tent, the pulse rates are noticeably higher. It's a mix of a newsroom on Election Night and an industry conference.
All day in the front room, Google shows off
its election resources: a nascent (it only works in a few states) addition to Google Maps that enables users to plug in their address and find out where to vote, a mobile elections site and a version of its Reader that shows what the candidates are reading. There are YouTube Upload Stations positioned around the tent.
On the second floor, Digg sponsors
panels on liberal causes, politics and media. On Monday, Ted Sorenson spoke on JFK and Jonathan Alter on FDR. Huffington, John Podesta, Paul Krugman and David Sirota talked about what it will take to win the election and how to extend the reach of the liberal media (they called it progressive).
Speakers criticized the mainstream media, but there wasn't a tone of bitterness at the power those companies wield. The model practiced in this headquarters has its own success stories, such as
Daily Kos (a lead sponsor of the tent) and
Talking Points Memo. Rather than criticize the model they don't think works, they focused on doing what they do, better.
And there seem to be innumerable variations of how they do their work and report this political convention. While everyone here is a blogger, it quickly becomes clear how un-descriptive the term is. One blogger described himself as part of the "commentariat." Another man, an ex-reporter from Hawaii, does the kind of shoe-leather reporting that any reporter should do, but he doesn't see enough of. A young J-school grad holds titles with a few organizations, doing a mix of commentary, advocacy and freelance reporting.
Gregg Levine, the New York-based member of the "commentariat," doesn't claim that he does journalism when he blogs for
The Seminal, a politics blog based in Washington, D.C., with more than 100,000 unique visitors a month. After work, and often all night, he trolls the Web, reading and deconstructing. He hits high gear after midnight, when newspapers post their stories for the next day.
Here's how he reported on the first day of the convention: He got up and hopped on a shuttle, where he saw a woman wearing buttons for both Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton. Then he got off the shuttle and saw a copy of
USA Today at a newsstand (an interesting feature of the convention scene is that people actually stand on street corners hawking newspapers).
The front-page story was about Clinton supporters being reluctant to get behind Obama. (
The New York Times also reported this, and it was the main topic of conversation on Fox News on Monday morning.)
Levine didn't buy it. He said he hasn't met anyone in Denver who simply refuses to support Obama. It was another example of the national media beating a drum that simply didn't resonate with his experience. So he showed up to the Big Tent and started working on
a post about it.
"Bloggers are now vital to the political debate the way pamphleteers were in the colonial period and the early days of the republic," said Jonathan Alter, describing them as "Thomas Paine-style pamphleteers with a better distribution network."
And they're having a bigger impact this year than ever, said Alter, a
Newsweek senior editor. He said he thinks that has everything to do with the ubiquity of online video -- the ease of producing it, sharing it and mashing it up into something else.
The Democrats
issued credentials to 124 blogs for the convention, which
it says is a record (about 30 were issued in 2004). But some 500 hold credentials for the Big Tent, according to Aaron Nelson of Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, one of the lead sponsors of the facility.
Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, which has 33 nonprofits and organizations headquartered in its building next to the Big Tent, is a natural fit for bloggers known for their mix of liberal advocacy, commentary, media criticism and reporting. (The plastic beer cups at the Big Tent are compostable; the urinals next door are
flush-free.)
Nelson said the goal is to create a figurative "big tent," with people of all political persuasions. He pitched a welcoming atmosphere, saying a blogger from the conservative
Heritage Foundation was using the space. (That blogger appears to be in the minority, considering the applause that erupted Monday night when U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy took the stage at the convention.)
Yet some of the work being done by these bloggers seems decidedly old-school. Ian Lind started blogging back in 2001, though at the time he didn't know that was what he was doing. His topic: the impending sale of his newspaper, the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin. He said there was some back-and-forth about whether he could blog about what was going on at the paper, and in the end he lost his job.
Now he blogs on his site,
iLind.net, which has about 8,550 unique visitors a month, and writes for an alternative weekly. (Essential to this arrangement, he said, is his wife's position as a tenured professor.) "I enjoy finding stories the dailies haven't written yet," he said. He searches online databases of government contracts, campaign finance reports and ethics disclosures. It's the kind of work he thinks newspaper reporters should be doing, but he doesn't see enough of.
He fills in the holes in local media coverage, opting to explain to his readers what a local ordinance says rather than quoting dueling perspectives. He avoids hot-button issues, tries not to write posts fueled by emotion or anger, and admits that his traffic probably suffers as a result.
"I think we need less rhetoric and more facts that lead people to conclusions," he said.
Like so many bloggers, he paid his own way to Denver, at a cost of about $2,200. This week, he is focusing on "both less and more than the spectacle." He went to Hawaii's delegate breakfast and described some of the last-minute rules of what folks could bring to the convention hall. He described some of the street demonstrations. He wrote about the convention's corporate sponsors.
He is not covering public policy or political issues. The Honolulu papers are here, he said, and that's what they do. "My philosophy has always been, don't compete on stories where they're strong. Compete where they're weak."
CORRECTION: The original version of this article had an incorrect figure for iLind.net's Web traffic.
