TECH

Bloggers Plan To Blanket GOP Convention

by Winter Casey

Sunday, Aug. 31, 2008


Move over, Bill Kristol. The 2008 Republican National Convention will be a showcase for a new crop of young political analysts who made their reputations not on ink and paper but in the blogosphere. GOP insiders will be toggling for their news and gossip on the Internet, checking in frequently with blogs like Erick Erickson's RedState and Ed Morrissey's Hot Air.

This year, the two major political parties issued credentials for far more political bloggers not affiliated with traditional media outlets than they did in 2004. Four years ago, Republicans credentialed about a dozen bloggers, and Democrats registered a little over 30. In 2008, Republicans expect to host as many as 200 bloggers in Minneapolis-St. Paul; the Democrats credentialed 120 bloggers at their convention in Denver last week. The GOP is treating bloggers the same as traditional journalists, even providing them with a large office space equipped with Internet and telephone access.

RedState.com, which was started in July 2004, is sending 11 credentialed bloggers to the convention. Erickson, 33, the full-time editor of the blog, says the team plans to cover every aspect of the convention, including protesters, speeches, delegates, and the traditional media. His reporters will be equipped with Flip video cameras--small, digital camcorders with virtually no buttons. RedState gets about 50,000 unique visitors a day, and is among the most widely read right-of-center blogs. Anyone can register with the website and post comments and views.

"We have a greater sense of what the base is thinking and their position on various issues than what you might get from someone who is living inside the Beltway," said Erickson, a former lawyer who runs the blog out of Macon, Georgia. He also has worked as a political consultant for several local, state, and national candidates, and cut his teeth as a political blogger for the cable news network MSNBC during the 2004 political season.

While RedState is a "must-read for those interested in the national political scene from the center-right point of view," Scott Graves says his blog, Red County, fills another niche. Its content is all "original and local," said Graves, 38, president of Partisan Media Group, which also runs Red County magazine, a two-year-old publication that targets influential politicos.

Ed Morrissey, 45, will be the lead commentator at the convention for Hot Air, a political blog owned by Michelle Malkin, the syndicated columnist, television commentator, and conservative blogger. A full-time, paid staffer, Morrissey says he normally gets at least 600,000 page views a day. During the convention, he plans to record his observations with the help of video and will focus on providing "a flavor of what is going on."

Morrissey has one of the more unconventional resumes for political blogging. Prior to Hot Air, he spent 18 years as a call-center manager and also managed a burglar- and fire-alarm business. In 2007, he went to work for BlogTalkRadio, and the rest is blogging history.

An alumnus of RedState, Joshua Trevino, 33, will be a convention scribe for his own blog, JoshuaTrevino.com. He blogs on an unpaid, part-time basis and has a targeted readership among policy wonks and GOP activists. He says he gets about 150 unique visitors a day, and plans to focus on the "flavor and intent" of the activist crowd in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Trevino is based in Sacramento, Calif., where he runs a political consulting firm, Trevino Strategies and Media. He previously was a vice president for public policy at the Pacific Research Institute and a onetime communications coordinator for the secretary of Health and Human Services.

A number of convention bloggers are based in Washington, D.C., and many worked previously on Capitol Hill, for executive-branch offices or in consulting. Blogger John Feehery, 44, is the former chief spokesman for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican. Also a regular commentator on the cable news network CNN, Feehery has an influential audience of Washington insiders and Hill staffers. His blog, JohnFeehery.com, has been up and running for about five months, with 300 to 400 visitors a day, he said. Feehery, who also owns his own consulting firm, the Feehery Group, says he has some ads on his website, though blogging, he says, is not paying the bills just yet. He says he's "hoping to get paid eventually."

Matt Lewis, Amanda Carpenter, and Jonathan Garthwaite will be covering the convention for TownHall.com, a popular blog owned by Salem Radio Network. Carpenter says the site plans to provide a video report each morning, in addition to several stories. Lewis is a former director of grassroots operations for The Leadership Institute, a national nonprofit conservative training organization. Carpenter is a former national debate champion for Ball State University, and Garthwaite has worked for the Leadership Institute and the Heritage Foundation, a right-leaning think tank.

D.C.-based bloggers David All and Joe Mansour will be covering the convention for TechRepublican.com, a group blog. A part-time, unpaid managing editor, Mansour says his team will focus on technology and politics targeting an audience of "influential political operatives who care about technology."

In existence since 2005, Matthew Sheffield's NewsBusters is a relative old-timer in the blogosphere. It averages about 100,000 readers per day, Sheffield said, and is the eighth-most "popular conservative site on the Web." Sheffield is a technology columnist for the Washington Times newspaper, and also runs a consulting company that advises other conservatives about how to start blogs.

Chad Everson, a credentialed blogger with GrizzlyGroundswell.com, plans to have content from more than 30 bloggers at the convention and to offer content from radio shows and streaming video channels. Jon Henke, the founder of a new site called TheNextRight.com, said, "We primarily reach Beltway influentials, activists, bloggers, and people active in the new media and politics nexus."

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