When it was first reported that bloggers would be receiving press credentials to cover the Democratic National Convention, amidst all the articles talking about how bloggers aren’t real journalists, there were two self fulfilling predictions made. One was that bloggers would go off the reservation and be smacked down for it, and the other was that the bloggers, and perhaps the convention as a whole would be disappointing.

Needless to say, the press are now reporting that both events have happened. In terms of the disappointment, I have had my own set of disappointments. First, for some undetermined reason, Greater Democracy didn’t get picked up by the cool convention aggregators, so our traffic only increased three-fold instead of five-fold. More importantly, no publisher has asked me to write a book and I haven’t landed a contract to write on a regular basis for New Yorker and/or The Atlantic Monthly. However, not having ones wildest dreams attained during a chaotic couple of days in Boston probably doesn’t really count as a disappointment.

First, however, let me address the issue of the blogger who got smacked down.

Bloggers’ Very Own Media Flap

It didn’t take long for the credentialed convention bloggers to have their own mini-media dustup. Today’s Technology Daily reports on blogger Matt Stoller’s severed relationship with the DNCC in the wake of his Barak Obama posting.

Technology Daily reported that Stoller had been ‘canned’. They refer to Stoller as ‘deleted’ and report that Matt’s post ‘prompted the DNCC to sever its affiliation with Stoller and remove his name from the blog of the committee’s Web site.’ As with any story there is probably a kernel of truth to it, and the managing editor of National Journal’s Technology Daily argued endlessly on a mailing list of convention bloggers that ‘The facts of the story are accurate, and they are not at all misleading.” Yet Stoller has written that the story isn’t true. Stoller wrote, “Well, I think that it is possible for media outlets to misconstrue what I say on my blog and confuse it with the DNCC blog, especially those with partisanized agendas”. So, the press got one of their stories.

In terms of the disappointment, it was even more of a reach. In his article, Cybertourists in Boston, Charles Cooper wrote, “With a few exceptions, most of the credentialed bloggers came off like cyberhayseeds in the big city”. To support his opinion, he quoted Rick Heller out of context and provided no link to the original post. He goes on to assert that since the bloggers did not meet his specific view of what blogging is about, it was a failure. It appears from the comments that the real failure has Charles Cooper’s failure to look critically and creatively at the big picture. Again, the press needed their story about blogging failing. Again, they had to stretch things considerably and they got their story.

The interesting story is of how the blogging ecosystems meshes with the mainstream media ecosystem. It has the potential to be symbiotic instead of competitive, even though some seem to miss this. It reminds me of the old saying, “A man of quality is not threatened by a woman of equality.” Perhaps something similar can be said about a journalist of quality and a blogger of equality.

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