TORONTO STAR: Pampered bloggers get plenty of access
Here’s a story by Andrew Chung of the Toronto Star talking about blogger access at the Democratic National Convention. Here are some of the highlights. For the record…I haven’t received a massage.
- Free massages. Lime or raspberry smoothies. A venue with a lot of cachet. Just for bloggers.If these Internet opinion artists, spilling their guts and brains on the Web on all subjects imaginable, were once considered fringe-types blathering inconsequentially to anyone who would read, that is most certainly no longer the case. They’re important enough now to even be pampered.
- The organizers committed to vastly expand the blogger pool at the convention. There is even an ultramodern Blogger Lounge adjacent to the convention floor.
- At the Democratic National Convention four years ago in Boston there were four bloggers. This year in Denver there are over 200. The golden age of blogging appears to be upon us as the profile bloggers have been given at this convention has lent a sense of legitimacy and credibility heretofore unknown to blogs.
- “It’s all so amazing because a few years ago I was just some opinionated guy who got agitated at dinner parties,” says David Goldstein, who runs the blog horsesass.org from Seattle, and is the Washington State delegation’s “embedded” blogger. “Now I’ve got a floor pass and I find it rather shocking.”
- “I’d say it’s advocacy journalism,” he says. “We use journalistic tools, but we have a definite point of view. I’d say (blogs) are a hybrid of journalism, editorial writing and talk shows.” Most bloggers here publicly support Barack Obama. Some have even given money to the Obama campaign.
