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Online ExclusiveWhite House Bloggers• Julie Mason
• Andy Alexander
• Brooks Kraft
• Jim Gerstenzang
• Dan Froomkin
• Tony Pierce
• Richard Dunham
• Mark Silva

The mainstream media's chase for readers, viewers, and advertisers is slowly changing the way some traditional straight-news journalists cover the White House. The trends are still subtle on the beat, but there's no question that President Bush's successor will reckon with new press headaches and communications options.

In an information marketplace that increasingly says, "Give them what they want" instead of, "Give them what they need," the Internet is encouraging news consumers to call the shots. The White House press corps, in some ways one of the last protected habitats for inverted-pyramid mainstream journalism, is tiptoeing toward those tastes with blogs, and with writing that entertains and mixes analysis with news. And to keep Web tom-toms beating with reader curiosity, White House journalists, who traditionally chased exclusives and sought to match rather than cite their competitors, have bowed to the online custom of accessorizing their blogs with "open source" news, information, and links.

"It's a very different kind of journalism than what I've done before," said the Los Angeles Times' White House correspondent, Jim Gerstenzang, who at his editors' urging recently began to focus almost exclusively on his newspaper's latest online invention, a blog called Countdown to Crawford. Like many news blogs, it offers bite-sized appetizers of information. And some posts are supposed to be more Cheez Whiz than escargot.

Gerstenzang, who has spent 38 years in news and works for a paper that has a new owner and lots of financial uncertainty, was eager to learn new tricks, along with colleague Johanna Neuman, in trying to build an audience for one-stop shopping about the final months of the Bush administration. "I'm not convinced that this is the right way to go, but it's the way it's going," Gerstenzang said of White House blogging.

Even as print news holes shrink and evening newscasts lose viewers, interest in the White House and in political news remains strong. Editors feel pressured to produce--preferably at little cost to their news organization--what audiences are buying. And that suggests that blog writing, verite video, and behind-the-scenes peeks at the presidency--offered by the same White House reporters who are paid to trail the president for grander purposes--might morph from sideshow to center ring during the next administration.

White House information that in the past would have remained in reporters' notebooks or in photographers' files now blossoms into public view on Washington-centered blogs with such names as Beltway Confidential (Houston Chronicle), The Swamp (Chicago Tribune), Window on Washington (Cox Newspapers), and The Washingtonpost.com's aggregator blog called White House Watch.

Time magazine's White House Photo Blog published online since September 2006, is designed "to show a little bit of life in the bubble," explains its creator, Time contributing photographer Brooks Kraft. His offbeat, detailed, and elegantly impromptu images from the White House mix with his colleagues' images from the campaign trail. The majority of the photography found on the website was shot to be published online.

Word-driven blogs are trickier. For the experienced, hard-core veterans who tend to land the White House press corps jobs, worrying about performance art--jollying readers and viewers in an effort to attract and inform them--feels unnatural, at least at first.

A blog about the presidency "can't be a reporter's notebook," said Richard Dunham, Washington bureau chief for the Houston Chronicle. "It can't be stories that aren't important enough for the newspaper. You must have some style. Boring means nobody reads it."

When Julie Mason's Houston editors told her two years ago to take her White House coverage for the Chronicle and make it a full-time blog, she said she was "enraged."

"I was a 'White House correspondent'!" she recalls protesting. "I didn't like all the [blogosphere's] opinions and the flippancy.... It's very contrary to what a journalist does." Mason remembers the hazing when her blog started. "Other reporters mocked me relentlessly: It was superficial and trivial ... we were trend monkeys, and it was the dumbing-down of everything we hold dear. I had worries about the same things."

Now she delights in the unplugged writing, the reader interactions, and the national cache that Beltway Confidential lends to her newspaper and to the sole author of the blog. MSNBC has made Mason a regular political analyst from the White House lawn--exposure her bosses applaud.

"I consider myself a color commentator to the news," said Mason, who has 20 years in the business. "I found a way to be a tart blogger without opinion."

Mason's topic headline on July 18: "President Bush: Further proof that he's shrinking." Her blog's version of the big news of that day: "The White House today used a peculiar construct for what is basically a capitulation on timetables for withdrawing troops from Iraq. But in perfectly opaque governmental spokesbabble, it was couched in language more suited to an overweening midlevel management retreat than a statement from the press secretary."

The Chronicle's straight-news version on its website came from The Washington Post's news service: "President Bush and Iraq's prime minister have agreed to set a 'time horizon' for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq as security conditions in the war-ravaged nation keep improving, White House officials said Friday."

White House officials proclaim themselves underwhelmed--arguing that blogging is passe and undermines trust in the news media. "Blogs are flat on the orange," said deputy White House press secretary Tony Fratto, using an expression that he explained means a thing that appears yummy but is "not worth it.... I'm not sure anyone pays too much attention to [blogs] anymore."

(Memo to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, the first Cabinet member to have an official blog ... )

Scott Stanzel, another White House press deputy, criticized traditional news organizations for losing much of their audience, then "shedding formality, balance, and attention to hard facts--the very things which set them apart from the blogosphere," he wrote in an e-mail. "News organizations are opening themselves up to even more charges of bias, thereby further eroding their own credibility and contributing to the loss of their traditional audience."

Ken Herman, White House correspondent for The Austin American-Statesman and the Cox chain of 17 newspapers, considers his posts to Window on Washington secondary to his print reporting duties. He has more license to write with "attitude" on the blog but prefers "a low snark factor," he said. "Opinion is verboten," he added.

"I look for behind-the-scenes happenings that offer a look at life in the White House. I also, of course, look for the quirky," said Herman, who covered Bush when he was Texas governor and will return to Austin next year.

But here to stick with the next administration is the Chicago Tribune's popular blog, The Swamp, which is capitalizing on its Illinois access to Barack Obama and its reputation for posting fresh supplies of newsy political content.

Mark Silva, the Tribune's White House correspondent who continually fills The Swamp, said that the blog site doubled its page views to 1 million a month from January 2006 to the end of 2007, then reached 3 million in February, when the presidential primary race hit full stride. Traffic has tapered off since spring to about 2 million page views a month.

Silva, who has 30 years of reporting experience, said that his blog posts can be "a little more analytical, something with a little edge, but we don't want it to be opinion, or partisan."

Having a White House news blog is a no-brainer, Silva said. "The news cycle is just not sufficient anymore. You can't put something out in the morning paper and expect it to be competitive."