# Posted 6:26 AM by Patrick Belton  

NEW OXBLOG FEATURE FOR THE CONVENTION: So this afternoon, I'll be taking off for a couple of blissful days in New York, involving seeing friends, having roast beef at Katz's and Mexican in Spanish Harlem, and napping with a few friends in Central Park (during the day, that is). It's the best city in the world, and I've missed it. I'll also be filming an interview, it looks like, with CNN to debate a yet-to-be-named blog sceptic at the Kennedy School of Government, and I'll let our readers know when that appears, in case any of you might be interested. I'll then reappear in Boston Sunday night, in time to host blogger's drinks (at The Field, in central Cambridge, at 7ish...)

More to the point, though, I've been able to give some thought to the way we'll be covering the Democratic convention. I don't see electronic media emerging as a competitor for broadcast and print journalism, but rather to complement them by doing things they're not by nature well suited to do. Blogs, for instance, don't share the word limits of print press or the time limits of network news. We're free to write as long as we feel is warranted by an interesting turn on events; or to say that nothing at all interesting happened that day. This is partially the result of the prose style, and partially the bliss of writing in a largely amateur medium.

One feature that I'd like to introduce here is something called roughly 'you ask the questions'. This is partly an admitted attempt to shovel off work onto our readers, partly one to take advantage of all the really quite extraordinary expertise of our readership, and partly also to try something that this prose style is conduicive toward - it's easier to ask readers to suggest questions for our interviewees when they're reading us at their computer, after all. Compared with calling in to C-span or writing the New York Times's ombudsperson, an aspect of interactivity is simply built into blogs, because unlike the last two media, the internet is naturally a two-way medium of communication.

So on here, I'll let our readers know which people we're going to be interviewing and when, and then during the interview, I'll pose the questions that we've received from our readers. The DLC and PPI have been quite nice to us in extending a large number of interviews with their principal staff; we'll also be conducting interviews with people in the Kerry foreign policy circle, and with members and staff from the foreign policy and national security committees of Congress.

I think this way of drawing on our readers to shape our coverage is rather democratic; and that in turn gets us back full circle to the convention. The conventions of both parties, and resembling in this respect both chambers of Congress, have principally evolved since 1976 as spectacles oriented toward televised consumption. The symbiosis has been less than mutually beneficial to each of the two species, though, with television decreasing its coverage markedly since 1976, when gavel-to-gavel coverage ended for all networks with the exception of ABC (which had ended its four years before), and more so in each convention thereafter. From the perspective of the media, particularly broadcast media, coverage is quite limited - NBC, for instance, will broadcasting only three hours from this year's convention, mostly to be taken up by the grand speeches and the roll call of the states; but from the perspective of the convention, it is still organised toward generating images on television which will sway voters to vote for the party's candidate. There's less substance, conveniently just as there's less room to catch it up in.

But there remain nonetheless those peculiarly political aspects of conventions that have in recent years been overtaken by the convention-as-spectacle elements, which a subversive medium like the blogosphere can seek to recover and reinvigorate. To film a declining few minutes of 'roll call of the states' footage, the parties have gone to the trouble of gathering representatives of every faction, region, and personality orbit within the party together in one place. So a blog-writer may as well take the opportunity to go and speak with them all.

The Democratic Party is, at the moment, a remarkably heterogeneous assembly, with Clintonites, Kennedyites, Deaniacs, and all the other personalized neologisms spinning around their respective charismatic centers. Blogs such us ours will be looking forward to spending more time speaking with people within each of those orbits - to inspect how the world looks from their perspective, what trends and trajectories may be important for their inhabitants, and which developments in their orbit they believe are underreported in the print and broadcast media.

And writing as an amateur and the equal of the person who is the subject of our journalistic gaze that moment will, I think, compel us to relate to the delegates we cover as individuals, with respect and humility, and without film crews hovering over our shoulders - or, still worse, the journalistic impulse to treat them as 'cute', with their profligacy of buttons. Personally, I'm very much looking forward to the opportunity. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion