From the BBC News Convention Weblog:
This will be the first convention covered by bloggers, those opinionated cyber-diarists who have renewed the internet’s promise of self-publishing. Bloggers blog at the bloggers breakfast To celebrate, the Democratic Party threw them a breakfast. “Do you have Wi-Fi?” one of the bloggers asked Michael Feldman who writes for DowBrigade.com. “No, and my server is down,” he answered. But he made the mistake of being the first blogger to whip out his laptop, and the traditional media pounced. Mutual distrust The Bloggers Breakfast was one of those surreal circular media events, where the traditional media cover someone who in turn covers the traditional media. Dean said the traditional media will increasingly become irrelevant I snapped pictures of them. They snapped pictures of me. I interviewed them. They interviewed me. The traditional media and bloggers have a mutual distrust. Bloggers think the traditional media are tapped out, and the traditional media think bloggers are amateur pundits. Even though I’m “blogging”, Michael told me I wasn’t a blogger because I was getting paid by a traditional media outlet, although he said that it was a matter of some debate in the blogging community. The suspicion was obvious. Veteran Associated Press reporter Walter Mears will actually be blogging this convention, and one of the bloggers asked him which candidate he supported so they could take that into account when they read his blog. ‘Not real journalists’ No dice, he wouldn’t tell. And they didn’t need to take his political affiliation into account, he said, because “I’m objective”. The hoots and laughter from the bloggers showed they were less than convinced. And when the blogging political pioneer Howard Dean addressed the audience, he added a large helping of media mistrust to the breakfast on hand. “If I were you, I wouldn’t be insulted if someone said you weren’t a real journalist,” he said, because news has increasingly become entertainment, not information. And he believes the traditional media will increasingly become irrelevant. “The net will become so ubiquitous over the next 25 years, that you will largely be able to bypass traditional media,” he said.
There were 15,000 accredited journalists at the Convention, of whom nearly half (I believe) were bloggers. As Kevin Anderson says in the BBC blog, even ‘traditional’ media like the BBC or Associated Press have sent their own bloggers – because blogging is an easy, quick way to release news instantly. I can imagine that the PR people for the Democrats had a nightmare of a time – any little mistake, anywhere, anytime, and the blogs would have it immediately. Whereas in the past they could brush it into a corner before press time or the news bulletins, now they have to be permanently alert…