Confessions of a 'Booger'

By MATT WELCH

BOSTON -- 'SoooOOOooo, Matt!" came the voice of Miami Herald humour columnist Dave Barry over the cellphone static, in full Church-Chat Lady mode. "How does it feel to be a b-LOG-ger at the Con-VENT-ion!!??"

It was only Day Two of the four-day Democratic National Convention, and already the word "blogger" had become roughly as popular in Boston as "Steinbrenner." With 15,000 journalists chasing 5,000 depressingly unified delegates, the Donner Party-like necessity for reporters to turn on each other proved too powerful, and this year's consensus prey of choice was that runty-looking media sub-species from the planet "blogosphere."

Weblogs -- frequently updated Web sites whose typically fragmentary content is posted in reverse chronological order, usually through easy-to-use software such as the market-leading Blogger (which bears much responsibility for the proliferation of that unfortunate word) -- have been around since the mid-1990s, and were already being employed to cover the Democratic and Republican conventions in 2000. (I contributed to one during Al Gore's kiss-a-thon in Los Angeles.)

All of this thrilling background information is easily obtainable by using the search functions of an obscure Web site called "Google," yet that did not prevent dozens of respected news organizations from spreading whoppers like: "But neither party has ever allowed bloggers to cover one of its presidential conventions firsthand." (Washington Post, July 5.)

What was truly different this time around was that the Democratic National Committee consciously handed out around 35 of its 15,000 press credentials to independent webloggers not tethered to any traditional news organization. While statistically on the insignificant side (being outnumbered 430 to 1 and all), the novelty of indie bloggers was an irresistible hook not just to the scrum of reporters on the scene, but to the tenured scolds in America's august learning institutions.

"Make no mistake," sniffed Harvard's Alex S. Jones, director of the Kennedy School of Government's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, on the opinion page of the Los Angeles Times. "This moment of blogging legitimization -- and temporary press credentials -- doesn't turn bloggers into journalists."

It's instructive to reflect that my profession's top educators confer the power of journalistic "legitimization" onto political parties, while desperately trying to claim that questionable role for themselves (even though there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution or American law that establishes anything like a credentialing process for reporters).

"The Democrats face an old problem," seconded Tom Rosenstiel, director of the oxymoronic Project for Excellence in Journalism. "Who is and who isn't a journalist?"

Funny; I talked to scores of Democrats in Boston that week and not a single one mentioned this pressing "problem." Maybe they had other priorities.

As did I, but as luck would have it, my name was lumped together with the Indy 35 on convention-blogger lists all over the damned Internet, even though A) I was credentialed as a magazine reporter, not a blogger, by the Periodicals Press Gallery; and B) none of my convention work was published on my personal weblog (but hey, thanks for all the traffic, guys!).

This meant that about one-third of my time at Boston's FleetCenter was devoted to giving interviews -- to the Wall Street Journal, Voice of America, Congressional Quarterly (!), National Public Radio, you name it. Who knew that a non-Democrat non-politician could be so interesting!

And the questions ... well, let's just say that I would have liked to see the 100 journalists in attendance from The New York Times, or the tent of sage-looking scribes from The New Yorker answer things like "Who did you support in the Democratic primary? (Or, if it's not applicable, who do you plan to vote for in November?)" or "Why should people read your coverage?"

Of course, it's difficult to explain why people should read your coverage when you're spending too much time talking, and not enough rocking. For it's true, even though I wasn't one of the Indy 35, I did have a hungry weblog to feed (reason.com/conventions), and when you are one of a reporting team of two, and possessor of the operation's lone computer, every minute spent doing one thing is a minute not doing something else.

Which is why I feel some tribal defensiveness at the generally lukewarm Big Media reviews of the blogathon. "This first effort can be best described as an experiment," wrote The Associated Press's Anick Jesdanun, in a typical summary. "As a member of the traditional media, I don't believe I need to look for a new job yet."

As a member of the traditional media, Jesdanun and most of her colleagues enjoyed all kinds of perks most of us could only dream about -- paid-for workspace, technical support, plenty of colleagues to share the workload, and so on.

Unlike the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles four years ago, there were no computers provided anywhere for the luckless one-man reporting acts. A single overcrowded "press filing room" inside the FleetCenter offered room for maybe 80 straggler journalists total, 30 on the last day when John Kerry's travelling press pack took it over. Tech support, for those of us who have trouble turning on our own cellphones without assistance, was limited (in my case) to desperate calls to friends in Los Angeles.

The other option was the pathetic little "Bloggers Row" up in the very top of the arena, but the echo from the stage made all speakers sound like Charlie Brown's teachers, and the patchwork wireless Internet connections on offer were, in the memorable words of Technorati.com founder David Sifry, "totally FUBAR."

In my lone 120-minute visit to the Blogger Dungeon, maybe 110 minutes were wasted bugging Sifry to fix my computer's Internet access. The moment he did (using the time-honored method of pretending to hit my laptop with a sledgehammer), I was approached by a reporter from NBC Radio. "Hi, I'm doing a story about bloggers...."

Five minutes later, the Internet was again FUBAR, and I was AWOL, heading outside the security perimeter to the Loser's Press Filing Center a couple of blocks away. After finally establishing a usable workspace, I headed back to the arena, only to find the Boston police had locked it down shut. "They handed out too many credentials," one cop shrugged.

Hundreds of us watched Kerry's "I really did serve in Vietnam" speech from the hot vantage point of a faraway television. For which, naturally, the bloggers were roundly mocked. (Not only were we being cross-examined at every step, several news organizations -- including the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and others -- had their own institutional weblogs that did nothing but blog about the bloggers. I kid you not.)

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. It's always fun to have your work read, and any press is good press, as long as they spell your name right. (Psst! Globe and Mail guys! It's W-e-l-c-h!)