Boston's Bloggers, Filling In the Margins (washingtonpost.com)

Boston's Bloggers, Filling In the Margins (washingtonpost.com): "Patrick Belton of Oxblog, an Oxford graduate student and self-described centrist who worked for Bill Bradley in 2000, sees the convention as 'a wonderful time to take a snapshot of all different factions, who's on the rise and who's on the relative wane.'
Belton has invited his blogging brethren out for a drink because 'we have to cultivate a reputation for delightful alcoholism.' The former Richmond resident adds: 'There's a lot happening on the margins that the more established media, by dint of time and space limits, just aren't able to cover. Blogs don't have word count limits.'

University of Missouri journalism professor Tom McPhail told USA Today that bloggers 'are certainly not committed to being objective. They thrive on rumor and innuendo' and 'should be put in a different category, like 'pretend' journalists.'
But the best bloggers report, prod, provoke and critique the mainstream press, which, as Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley illustrate, has had its own credibility problems in recent years. And this year a spate of regular journalists will be doing the blogging thing, including veteran Walter Mears at the Associated Press. CNN.com will have a BlogWatch digest of other blogs, as will a site called ConventionBloggers, while the 'Hardball' team at MSNBC will be sounding off on 'Hardblogger.'

All of which underscores the central paradox of Boston: huge media hordes for an event with shrinking political significance and shrinking audiences.
Newsweek's Howard Fineman, who will be filing online dispatches from his BlackBerry on the convention floor, calls it "a real-time EKG of my response to the convention as a reporter and a yakker. We're all going to spend our time reading each other's blogs and blog our way to oblivion. If there was any real news, we'd all be too busy to blog." "


By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer