The mo'Times

Articles of interest about mo'time, the blogosphere, culture and society

Bloggers at the Democratic Convention

Press passes issued to bloggers —

Ready for prime time:
The New York Times reports that the Democratic party has issued press passes for about 3 dozen bloggers to cover the Democratic Convention in Boston. Read the article, "Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of Convention Press Corps." (Note: requires free registration, and after a period of time this article will pass into the archives of the NYT, which require payment.)

There are interesting issues to consider as this form of first-person reporting earns a place in the mix of news sources available to us. Bloggers, unlike mainstream journalists, generally take a strong point of view and do not hesitate to editorialize in their writing. What criteria will be used to choose the bloggers that are invited to political events?

In today's media circus we already have arrived at the point where the reporting of the event influences the event itself. Is there a risk that event planners will invite controversial bloggers just to generate attention? It seems like the reporting of an event has become an event in and of itself.

Other articles covering this story, with links to some of the blogs in question:

• Live From Boston: Democratic Convention Bloggers At Work
• NPR Audio: Bloggers Offer Intimate View of Convention
• Bloggers Make Debut at Democratic Convention

posted by: howard at 23:35 | link | comments |

Scheduled downtime

Tonight at about 10:30 p.m. (22:30 CET) we will shut down the site for about 30 minutes to do some needed maintenance and upgrades. These times are approximate, so please be flexible! In any case, it may be down for an hour at the most but, according to our best estimates, much less...

posted by: howard at 20:08 | link | comments |

Patience is a virtue

You may experience a delay from the time you publish a post until it appears on your blog, even though you can see it from your post-editor panel. We are working on the database and hope to have everything back to normal as soon as possible. Sorry for any inconvienience.

posted by: howard at 14:43 | link | comments |