“I’ve been carrying around the laptop for two hours today wandering through the city,” she continued. “The laptop is in there, and it’s not moving. It stays there for the rest of the convention. I’ll be moving, but not the laptop. After walking three miles in the sun—it’s a presence in your life you’d like to eliminate.”
For journalists, being powerful in the arenas they cover is as significant as being powerful in their own industry. A political reporter wants to affect politics. But at this convention, the public message of the Obama campaign has been: We don’t need you.
It’s an old tactic and it’s been tried before; traditional news outlets have almost always had the last laugh. Such was at least technically the case when CNN reported that Joe Biden would be Barack Obama’s running mate at 12:42 a.m., Aug. 23. The Obama campaign was forced to send out its famous text message in the middle of the night. It reached 2.9 million people.
Paul Bedard, a senior writer at U.S. News and World Report, has been covering conventions since 1992.
“In past campaigns, the candidates gave access to a lot of important people,” he said. “I remember covering Kerry, and you had the daughters making the rounds and they made news. Here? We don’t even have access to the Biden campaign. For print, it’s frustrating, but I hear from a lot of folks in TV [that] they’re pulling their hair out because you get surrogates and the surrogates are second-tier. We had Dick Durbin for one event, but it’s hard to even get close to the family.”
Gregg Birnbaum, the New York Post’s political editor, was sanguine about his paper’s news projects at the convention.
“There’s plenty of news, and plenty of good exclusives that are out there that we want to get,” he said. “We had a good one yesterday about Rangel and the DNC giving $100,000 back that he had donated—that was an important get. What a nice way to kick off the convention!”
In an interview with The Observer, Rangel said he hadn’t heard of the story; asked an aide, who also didn’t know it; and said, “So much for the New York Post.”
Of course, every newspaper has a story, if it follows its hometown around the convention center. But then, isn’t this convention about the whole broad sweep of the country?
For Mr. Nagourney, those kinds of stories come about when you get someone like David Axelrod to sit down in a diner in Iowa, fill him with some dinner and your own notebook with some good background.
“It was always a lot of people, but now you’ve got lots of bloggers and lots of reporters with mini-cameras, which also makes these guys even less likely to attempt to be candid,” Mr. Nagourney said. “If they say anything dumb or flip, they know it’ll instantly be on YouTube.”
ABOUT A 20-MINUTE walk outside the press perimeter in the Pepsi Center parking lot, Google created “The Big Tent,” a filing camp for bloggers and writers that includes a $100 fee, and endless amounts of amenities: free food, beer, filing areas, back massages, smoothies.
“I’ve been talking to my three reporters at the Pepsi Center, and this is clearly the place to be,” said Wendy Norris, the managing editor of the Web site The Colorado Independent, who was perched on a chair from the Google filing center on Wynkoop Street. “There’s a great buzz going on here—it’s chaotic, it’s collegial, people are giving tips to each other.”
The Big Tent is also located right next to a building that holds the Huffington Post Oasis—the spa-like place that makes the convention almost look like a vacation.
“I feel relaxed!” said a particularly refreshed Eric Alterman as he stepped away from a complimentary facial for a minute. “I’ll tell you this—everyone should add facials to their lives.”
The Times’ David Carr visited, and Mother Jones’ David Corn came two days in a row.
At the Oasis, you bumped into a lot of people wearing skinny jeans with designer button-downs with some of the buttons undone at the top just so, a noticeable contrast to the rumpled tie and wrinkled pants affect in Media Pavilions 2, 4 and 5 in the Pepsi Center parking lot. Bloggers, including Rachel Sklar and Fishbowl NY’s Glynnis MacNicol, were there.
“I think it’s great!” said Verena von Pfetten, the living editor for the Huffington Post who was spending her time at the convention live-blogging the Oasis. “I think there’s such a great energy, and people are just having much more fun at this convention than in ’04—or maybe that’s because we’re here.”
