Blogs and Politics

A friend, Graham Nelson, directs me to this article about the new emerging role of blogs. Some exerpts follow

[Democratic] Convention organizers have obviously recognized their importance too — the bloggers, though they're almost all delegates anyway, are being given full journalistic privileges, meaning they have access to all the press materials in the media centre and access to data lines to post their stuff.

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What they're all skirting around saying is that Big Media are no longer satisfying the regional needs of the politically active community. With newspapers losing ground to television, people who want to know what's happening must absorb it the way TV news presents it: As a national story, with pundits from the national stage analyzing the events.

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Bloggers are rushing in to fill a void, one that was once held by local newspapers, who sent reporters as representatives of a constituency back home to report on major events in the way that mattered to their communities. Consolidation of ownership in the media has largely done away with that.