There Is No Cat

The blogging of the convention

David Weinberger bemoans the lack of access to the really good parties at the Democratic convention for convention bloggers, the people who were officially credentialed by the Democratic party to cover the convention on their blogs. I’m sorry you can’t get in to the good parties, David. That is really what I was hoping for from convention bloggers, the kind of stuff that doesn’t show up on C-SPAN, reports from parties and the random interactions and such. I’m sorry to say I’ve been disappointed so far with the blogging of the convention overall. At any convention I’ve ever been to, the real action occurs in the hallways and at the parties. I’ve seen very little of this from the officially credentialed bloggers. Maybe the problem is that y’all are neither fish (delegates) nor fowl (reporters), and so you can’t really give the perspective of either. Bloggers are most interesting when they can bring a unique perspective and specialized knowledge to the table. For the most part, the bloggers attending the convention just aren’t connected enough (within the context of the convention) to be able to do this.

One of the few exceptions to this that I’ve seen is Dan Perkins’ (a.k.a. comics artist Tom Tomorrow) account of his day hanging out with Michael Moore, a day that ended up in Jimmy Carter’s skybox, where Carter’s daughter Amy mentioned to him that she had just bought one of his books of Tom Tomorrow comics that very day.

But by and large, most of the coverage from Bloggers’ Row seems like it could have been done at home by people watching C-SPAN. And sadly, it’s just not very interesting. I think what’s really needed isn’t to credential bloggers to come to the conventions as amateur journalists, but for delegates and other people working on the convention to create blogs. That would have a better chance of being interesting. I don’t know what it’s like to attend a convention as a delegate, or as a volunteer. Sadly, after this experiment, I still don’t know. And it seems to me that that’s where the real value in blogging the conventions would be found.

Posted at 8:51 PM