The Love-Fest
As bloggers and netroot activists gathered at this year's YearlyKos Convention, Public Eye was wondering how the mainstream media would cover their new media friends – and how the blogging community would react to the presence of the traditional media folks they so often criticize.
In an interview, YearlyKos executive director Gina Cooper told us that there were 250 credentialed media covering the event, with at least 75 percent (a conservative guess) of them being from traditional media outlets. "We are at frickin' capacity," she said. "We are overwhelmed. It is really an honor to have so many people."
Abdon M. Pallasch from the Chicago Sun-Times said that upon arriving at the convention, he joked, "I am with the dinosaur press!" Pallasch said he "found no animosity or resentment" and that the participants welcomed him with open arms.
Look at the "In the News" section of the Convention's web site and you will find no blog clips, only clips from the Chicago Tribute, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other major old media outlets (as of today, anyway).
And in full old-new media love-fest style, Matt Bai, writer for The New York Times Magazine, and Joan McCarter, contributing editor at Daily Kos, will moderate the Presidential Leadership Forum on August 4.
While in the past new and old media might have clashed, Cooper sees that phenomenon as simply "growing pains," like when radio was introduced to the television set. After all, Cooper argues, a reporter for the New York Times or a blogger on Daily Kos each want the same outcome -- a contention, incidentally, that bloggers on the right might agree with, though for very different reasons. "I keep saying over and over again that our goal here is to give people the information they need," she said.