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Most likely Poynter Online's last roundup of material about the major parties' political conventions until 2016

Last Thursday night's Democratic National Convention lineup got four million tweets flying, double Twitter's weekly average for political tweets, Emily Schultheis reports. Less data-y, but maybe more important:

“I wouldn’t be shocked if a fair amount of the attention paid to the convention was through Twitter primarily,” said GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini of EngageDC, a digital advertising firm. “If you’re like me, someone who hangs on every word someone is saying, you have far fewer options for TV apart from C-SPAN.”

Maybe we should focus more on how the 15 percent of adult Internet users who are on Twitter use the service rather than on statistics whose utility is not exactly clear? Or maybe we should focus on the 85 percent of voters who are not on Twitter? (more...)

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Last week in Tampa, Michael Calderone writes, Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Sheelah Kolhatkar briefly attended the Republican National Convention and walked away with one of the event's few big scoops: an account of a Karl Rove-hosted breakfast that opened a rare window on how big-league fundraising occurs in U.S. politics. "Scoops and valuable, legitimate nuggets of insight and information are hard to come by in Conventionland, yet reporters who swarmed the halls en masse in Tampa are all at it again in Charlotte," Calderone writes.

Washington Post reporter Dan Balz tells Calderone it's important for journalists to be at conventions anyway. Among other reasons: "You can't get a feel for the optics in a way that you do if you're watching TV." (Optics again!) Mother Jones' David Corn tells him access is a lot easier at the convention: "Frankly, it's sometimes hard to get people on the phone if you're not The New York Times or Washington Post." Corn calls the convention a "really, really big green room," Corn said. "In the green room, everyone's kind of equal." (more...)

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Paul Ryan's speech to the RNC Wednesday night "pushed the debate onto a higher plane," David Gergen told CNN. It also, as the Associated Press put it, took "factual shortcuts." Josh Marshall says members of the news media must now decide whether Ryan's higher plane is so high the truth can't possibly be expected to take root there:

The real question to watch over the next 24 hours is whether that lying thing breaks through into its own issue, as something reporters who are afraid of getting smacked around by campaigns are actually willing or feel they need to discuss.

It's not any great feat Thursday morning to find fact-checks and blog posts strafing Ryan's speech. (Here are a few: 1, 2, 3). What's rare is The Washington Post's excellent "Say What" feature about the speech, which breaks it down line by line and has a collection of popular tweets about the speech and in-line links from Post writers, the paper's fact-check blogger and others. There's also one of those charts that shows how many tweets were sent at various times during the speech. (more...)

Journal-isms | Witches' Brew
Patricia Carroll is the CNN cameraperson who got peanuts thrown at her at the Republican National Convention Tuesday, Richard Prince reports. Carroll, who is black, told Prince "she does not want her situation to be used for political advantage."

"This situation could happen to me at the Democratic convention or standing on the street corner. Racism is a global issue," she said by telephone from Tampa.

Carroll also told Prince that no one got the names of the peanut throwers, who said: "This is what we feed animals."

She alerted fellow camera operators, producers and CNN security. The head of the delegation — she was not certain of the state — told her the perpetrators must have been alternates, not delegates.

Witches' Brew also has an interview with Carroll and a photo of her.

Carroll told Prince that she's not doing any more interviews about what happened.

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You only have to pump the words "why conventions matter" into Google News to realize a counterintuitive take on their worth is overdue. Brendan Nyhan says the reason you see so many people deriding conventions as "infomercials" is they make it much harder for members of the news media to step between message and voters:

In every other aspect of the campaign, the candidates and their messages are filtered through journalists who are reticent to allow them to speak or be quoted at any length without interpretation or analysis. ... Unlike the debates, which are moderated by journalists, the conventions allow the parties and the candidate to speak to voters unfiltered in prime time.

That hasn't stopped journalists from trying, writes Bill Keller, who says conventions "are tedious, scripted events matched and surpassed in their shallowness by the ceaseless chorus of commentary supplied by my tribe."

Jeremy W. Peters checks in on media coverage of the convention and finds "the new media has decided that it wants to be the old media, and the old media has decided that it wants to be the new media." The Huffington Post and Bloomberg are hawking magazines; The Washington Post and The New York Times are splashing out on Internet video, which they (privately) concede "draw extremely low traffic compared with their articles." Politico Editor-in-Chief John Harris describes its video effort as “kind of groping cheerfully with a sense of fun and experimentation."

Some journalists are finding news to cover: "An attendee at the Republican National Convention in Tampa on Tuesday allegedly threw nuts at a black camerawoman working for CNN and said 'This is how we feed animals,' ” Kyle Leighton reported Tuesday night. In a statement, CNN confirmed "there was an incident directed at an employee inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum earlier this afternoon" and said it "worked with convention officials to address this matter and will have no further comment.” (more...)

Nobody's covering members of the media in Tampa this week like Politico reporter Patrick Gavin. He's been tweeting "rules" for covering the convention that, as my boss showed yesterday, most journalists at the RNC are following.

Convention Coverage Rule #18: What's important is not that you're here, but that everybody else knows that you're here.

— Patrick W. Gavin (@pwgavin) August 28, 2012

(more...)

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Networks have a secret ally to help them cover two big stories at once, reports Jeremy W. Peters. And it's already infiltrated your home!

Michael Clemente, executive vice president for news at Fox News, said that even if the storm becomes so severe that it warrants split-screen coverage with the convention, such coverage is hardly a rare event in today’s hyperactive news cycle. Larger, more rectangular television screens now allow cable news channels to offer three screens at once. “There’s more real estate now,” he said.

That real estate may go unclaimed: NBC and CNN spokespeople told Politico's Dylan Byers "split screen" may not actually mean split screen. (more...)

Let's talk conventions. To save time, here's a Storify that strongly implies the only RNC coverage fans of meta-journalism need is Patrick Gavin's Twitter account. (more...)