It was Monday, the opening night of the Democratic Convention, past 10 p.m. Over on ABC, anchor Peter Jennings was expounding on the latest horse-race poll pitting Democrat John Kerry against President Bush. On Fox News Channel, Alan Colmes was wanly defending Bill Clinton against the charge that he was a liberal.
As reports from the mainstream media fall into familiar patterns, a new form of political coverage is emerging online. The upstarts are approximately 30 Web loggers - bloggers - who for the first time have received credentials from the Democratic National Convention to file their own brand of political reporting.
Some are longtime media professionals. Others are Democratic delegates who are keeping online diaries. Still others, including a high-school student, a Web designer and a lawyer, have no journalistic affiliation or political experience. Many don't consider themselves journalists but observers who simply are filing thoughts and opinions from their assigned desks in the nose-bleed seats of the FleetCenter in Boston.
The Web log discussions are lively, partisan, trivial, weighty, irreverent or irrelevant. They incorporate visual cues such as maps, photographs or political ads with written analyses and online links to reports from the traditional press, sometimes with cutting commentary. And they encourage responses and rebuttals from readers - the conversational "threads" that often feed further commentaries from the bloggers themselves.
A good fit
Web logs offer a perfect format for an event invested with political emotion but little true news, says Jonathan Dube, managing producer for MSNBC.com and publisher of cyberjournalism.net.
"The most interesting information tends to be tidbits of observations, gossip and news nuggets," Dube says by e-mail. "The bloggers - particularly the delegate bloggers - are doing a good job of capturing the excitement the Democrats at the convention are feeling. There may not be a lot of news, but for a lot of people this is a big deal, and that really comes through."
Here's the introduction to the Boston Globe's coverage of Monday night: "Democrats raised the curtain on their four-day presidential nominating convention last night with spirited speeches urging voters to elect Senator John F. Kerry for his national security credentials and the economic and social programs he promises."
On www.talkleft.com, Denver lawyer Jeralyn Merritt wrote this from the convention hall:
