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Summary of the Study
There were four people at YearlyKos who hope to be president in two years. Their ability to become president may be partially dependent on blogging done about them.
This is a huge responsibility and privilege, or power, if you will.
YearlyKos was said to have had between 1,000 and 1,500 bloggers in attendance. This presented an unprecedented opportunity to see how bloggers perform who are all in a position to have roughly equal opportunities to report on soon-to-be Democratic primary candidates.
Data
On June 14, three days after the end of YearlyKos, I performed searches on Technorati, continuously between 10 am and 2:30 pm.
The search terms I used were:
clark yearlykos
visnack yearlykos
richardson yearlykos
warner yearlykos
I did not cover blogging that occurred prior to the first day of the convention. I eliminated blogging with the following characteristics:
Exact copies of other websites already tallied
Websites that I couldn’t get onto
Websites that no longer had the candidate’s name or where I couldn’t find the candidate’s name
Websites run by the candidates or where the name of the website contained the candidate’s name
Blogs about someone who works for the candidate
Blogs that do not refer to events at Yearlykos
I’ve also left out mentions of the candidates on Blogometer, which presents overviews of what the blogs are saying, and I’ve left out three websites discussing Warner that seemed to be letting their partisanship for Warner overly influence what they reported as facts.
The results for all of the candidates as a group were as follows:
Total number of blogs mentioning the candidates: 240
Total number that simply listed that they were attending or on a panel: 93
Casual discussions of parties, pastries, or “bumping into in the hall” type: 24
Discussions of whether a candidate (Warner) could buy influence with bloggers: 34
Quotes of candidates indicating importance of bloggers: 41
Blogs that quoted print media with little comment or blogs to link to print media: 40
Impressions of the candidate or his speech, mostly one sentence long: 17
Reporting on at least one detail of the candidate’s speech: 11
At least several paragraphs detailing policy views of the candidates expressed at Yearlykos: 6
Quotes from the candidates on the importance of bloggers all originated in the mainstream press, primarily from Nagourney of The New York Times, and were passed around by bloggers. The mainstream media sought out no quotes from Clark on the importance of bloggers.
Four of the blogs reporting at least one detail of the candidate’s speech were conservative blogs, reporting primarily on audience reaction to Warner’s mention of Zarqawi.
Vilsack seems to have gotten the least coverage. One blog got Vilsack’s first name wrong, another got his state wrong. No bloggers formed any impressions of him. No bloggers wrote about his panel.
Richardson didn’t fare much better. He had just one blogger who formed a one-sentence impression of him. His speech also had just one sentence of coverage that mentioned some of the topics he talked about.
Clark and Warner each had three fair to good blogs that provided details about what they spoke of in their panels. The best analytical coverage of of anything said by the candidates came from a blogger who discussed Warner’s foreign policy statements, including questions asked by her (though some will no doubt disagree with the views of the author).
Thoughts
Four men who may be president. Six reasonable blogs about their substantive policy ideas from an audience of at least 1,000 bloggers.
Why so few?
Bloggers have been very critical of the mainstream media for refusing to do more investigative reporting, for simply “reporting” the information that the White House provides them with. For acting like sheep and failing to inform the general public. Yet there were very few instances of original reporting and only one case of something resembling investigative journalism. Mainstream media were, in fact, heavily quoted.
Bloggers have also had a chip on their shoulders because many feel they should be accorded the same sort of respect as journalists, with their own “seat at the table.” Yet would 1,000 journalists have failed to provide more than 6 reports on candidates’ presentations?
Perhaps when journalists hold conventions, they go there to network and socialize with other journalists, not to report on events taking place at the convention. If candidates also come to their conventions and talk about issues they care about, these events aren’t newsworthy, because they’re really just staged to woo the journalists. Perhaps the presence of candidates at journalist conventions is just what journalists are due — a sign of respect. A setting in which impressions can be formed and deals can be made but where the real meat of what takes place between candidates and journalists is behind closed doors. A place where reporting doesn’t belong.
Maybe that’s what happened with this bloggers’ convention.
But should it?
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