Digital Journalism Case Study: Live Blogging a Political Convention

In the old days, you needed a press credential from a recognized news organization in order to get a press pass to an event like this. I used to have such credentials, but I long ago stopped being a full-time reporter, so now I'm more in the position of your average citizen journalist. But thanks to the rapid growth in recognition of bloggers, most media relations people go out of their way to be accommodating, and that was true in this case of the California Democratic Party. You do need to contact them ahead of time, though, and you do need to reassure them that you're legitimate in some way, and not a nut.

The California Democrats set aside a special table for live-bloggers on the convention floor, including the 20 or so who were there just on behalf of political blog site calitics.com. Meanwhile the traditional media were arrayed on a riser so they would have good camera clearance, and be out of the way of the delegates.

As a new feature this year they set up free wireless access, although their router ran out of DNS addresses during peak periods (at least that's my guess as to the problem), forcing the out-of-luck to pay $12.95 for the convention center network's day pass.

A blogger needs to travel light. My laptop is an Apple 17" G4 Powerbook - good for photo editing, and Macs pick up wireless networks with no fuss. My camera is a Canon Powershot S3 IS. The S3 is halfway between a good snap shooter and an SLR. It has very nice image quality, lots of manual control in addition to all the auto convenience you might want, 12x optical zoom and digital image stabilization, and since it's relatively small, it allows shooting, transferring and editing in tight spaces. It can also enable a more inside perspective on an event, since symbolically the camera says "just another guy" instead of "media outsider". (This is not to say that one doesn't suffer from an occasional outbreak of lens envy when the pro photogs whip out their giant white-banded telephoto light-vacuums.) I edited photos with Adobe Photoshop Elements and uploaded posts via Drupal's blog module.

My setup was small and flexible enough that I was able to transfer and edit images while covering an event. I had a post about a Hillary Clinton press conference uploaded, with photos, before the press conference was over.

The traditional media take a little longer to get the story out, as they should. But they too are going for lighter, more agile setups. Photographers were editing their own photos on laptops, and videographers were editing on briefcase-sized rigs in the press room before uploading finished reports via satellite links through trucks parked outside.

Despite the added flexibility, deadline pressure - combined with celebrity value - still has a big effect on what news reaches the audience. Below are two photos: the one on the left shows the media horde waiting to cover Hillary Clinton following her prime late-morning speech slot; the other is the single lonely cameraman who was waiting for her fellow candidate Chris Dodd later that day - although there were still other media around, the TV people had to be off filing their stories for the evening news.

Then there was Citizen Kate of citizenkate.tv, who covered the whole convention at her own untroubled pace. To quote Kate's home page: "You don't need to be a pundit to cover politics. You just need to look cute and ask questions and have a camera to record stuff."

Kate, to the delight of other reporters, prefaced her questions for candidates with variations on "I don't know a single thing about any of this." She managed to both embody and mock the airheadedness of young citizens manqué as she helped them discover the non-me world, while also poking at the self-importance of Citizen Kane-style Big Media.

But I think blogging adds more to a political event than enhanced speediness or quirky new perspectives. It also proveds an extra dimension of discussion, one that allows for more detail and more involvement than there would ever be room for in traditional media. For example, at the convention's end, a controversy erupted over some resolutions about President Bush and the Iraq War. Live bloggers on the convention floor discussed the argument in real time, seeking to understand the parliamentary technicalities involved and to get at the core issues, which of course were far more serious. Their efforts both brought a wider audience to the convention floor and enhanced everyone's understanding of what was going on.