Beantown Becomes Blogtown
At the Democratic convention, online journalism arrives.
JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL - WSJ.com
BOSTON--It isn't news that more than 15,000 journalists are descending on this city to cover the Democratic convention. What is news is that for the first time several dozen political bloggers will receive media credentials to report on the event. Pay attention to these savvy computer mavens, for their postings are one of the most interesting ways in which the Internet is empowering people and shaping political coverage.
Blogs--short for Web logs--are online journals that combine running commentary with links to related sites. Bloggers tend to have contrarian outlooks, employ irreverent humor and frequently update their sites in order to draw readers back. New technology allows anyone with just a smattering of technical knowledge to become minipublisher and reach anyone with an Internet connection at very little cost. A study by the Perseus Development Corp. estimates that by next year over 10 million blogs will have been created, most by people merely chronicling their daily life in a sort of public diary.
Only 4% of Americans go to blogs for news and opinions, according to a 2003 Pew Internet Survey. But they're influential nonetheless. Blogs attract high-profile readers in media and politics with nonstop access to a computer--that is, they influence the influencers. "They provide links to information that would not otherwise come to my attention," says former Treasury Department official Bruce Bartlett, who counts Lucianne.com, RealClearPolitics.com, ABC News's The Note and the Drudge Report among the most valuable sites.
Pentagon officials say that coverage of Iraq's liberation and its aftermath was made richer by military bloggers who provided on-scene commentary that even journalists embedded with the U.S. military also appreciated. One Marine's blog report that the Arab TV channel al-Jazeera was paying people to shoot at U.S. troops was read by military officers and led to arrests. Salam Pax, a pseudonymous Baghdad blogger, toured his city with ABC's Ted Koppel for an episode of "Nightline" and has since landed a book deal.
Popular political bloggers such as Mickey Kaus, Josh Marshall, Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan and James Taranto often provide an early-warning system on breaking stories and wind up helping to shape the coverage of big media outlets. In late 2002, bloggers of all political stripes vigorously denounced the insensitive racial remarks of Sen. Trent Lott, prompting mainstream journalists to cover Mr. Lott's remarks and his racial history, and helped force his resignation as Senate majority leader. Jim Romenesko's Media News, a blog sponsored by the Poynter Institute, served as a bulletin board for the complaints of disgruntled New York Times reporters after the Jayson Blair scandal and along with other bloggers created pressure that forced executive editor Howell Raines to quit.
"Stories were developed on various blogs and grew in importance and repetition and elaboration until the mainstream, elite press took note and began to follow the stories and create an 'opinion storm,' " says Hugh Hewitt, a blogger and radio talk show host. "Radio gave print a big elbow, and then television gave radio a body blow. The fourth generation of technology has arrived, and blogs are at the center of it."
Dan Weintraub, a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, can testify to the usefulness of blogs to journalists. He started his blog just before last year's California recall election and received many valuable tips through it, such as a heads-up that Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, the leading Democratic candidate, was trying to circumvent campaign-finance restrictions by soliciting contributions for a dormant 2002 political committee that was governed by looser rules. The revelation steered his campaign into a crater and he was eventually forced to pay a large fine. Journalists "can't put out 100 telephone calls a day, but you can put something on the Web that people can read and either take the time to e-mail or call," Mr. Weintraub says.
Mickey Kaus, who wrote for The New Republic and Newsweek and now blogs for Slate, says a great advantage of blogging is that "you can post something and provoke a quick response and counterresponse, as well as research by readers. The collective brain works faster, firing with more synapses." At its best, he believes, the speed of blogs can move "fast enough to have real-world consequences that print journalism or even edited Web journalism can't have."
Of course, blogs can also serve as transmission belts for errors, vicious gossip and last-minute disinformation efforts. But they also can almost instantaneously correct themselves. Newspapers take time to do that, and TV news programs rarely admit error.
Blogs are also becoming a boon to political campaigns. Howard Dean vaunted to the front of the pack of Democratic presidential candidates last year partly on the popularity of his Blog for America, which drew 100,000 visitors a day, drove up Internet contributions and enabled his supporters to coordinate public meetings and reinforce each other. "What I find fascinating is that his campaign has ended, but his blog is still alive," Paul Gronke, a political scientist at Reed College, told United Press International.
Since then, campaigns have cultivated blog readers. John Kerry sent the first word of his selection of John Edwards as his running-mate to his e-mail supporters. George W. Bush's campaign responded with a campaign ad on its Web site, featuring an endorsement by Sen. John McCain, whom Kerry had pitched to consider a spot on his ticket.
Technology is moving so fast that there are now a growing number of video bloggers, or "vloggers," who look toward the day when they can produce original programming, bypassing the usual broadcast networks and cable channels.
Some congressional campaigns are now advertising on blogs. Earlier this year, Kentucky Democrat Ben Chandler bought $2,000 worth of ads on several popular political blogs to promote his candidacy in a special election for the House. The ads wound up bringing in $80,000 in contributions. Mr. Chandler won the previously Republican seat.
Blogging is also branching out in new directions. MooreLies.com exposes inaccuracies and hype in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." In an upcoming paper, political scientists Henry Farrell and Daniel Drezner report on how blogs serve "as repositories of local knowledge" that supplement what local media report on stories in their area. In Colorado, the Rocky Mountain Alliance of Blogs is covering the hot GOP primary between beer magnate Pete Coors and former Rep. Bob Schaeffer with a great deal more insight than the Denver newspapers.
The South Dakota Senate race between Minority Leader Tom Daschle and former Rep. John Thune is being aggressively covered by three blogs: Daschle v. Thune, South Dakota Politics and Sibby Online. They provide a credible counterweight to local South Dakota papers such as the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, which too often falls into the habit of ignoring new angles to the race and uncritically running Mr. Daschle's press releases.
Randell Beck, editor of the Argus Leader, is feeling the heat. In a column yesterday, he wrote: "Those perched on the political fringes have found a home on the Internet. True believers of one stripe or another, no longer content to merely bore spouses and neighbors with their nutty opinions, can now spew forth on their own blogs, thereby playing a pivotal role in creating the polarized climate that dominates debate on nearly every national issue. . . . If Hitler were alive today, he'd have his own blog."
According to Godwin's Law, an Internet discussion-group dictum that long predates blogging, when one side in an argument invokes Hitler, it proves he's lost. And indeed, Mr. Beck's column announced the Argus Leader's own tepid entry into the world of blogging.
It will always be possible for someone to point to many of the millions of amateur bloggers and dismiss them as nerdy faddists and their work as largely trivial. Most bloggers will burn out and move on to something else. But a handful are slowly building a shadow media infrastructure that will become a significant component of the media in the 21st century. There might not be much news at this year's Democratic convention, but a real story can be found in the bloggers who are making their debut this week at a major national political conclave.
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