John Bracken

My trusty correspondents at last month’s BlogHer conference reported that the State of the Momosphere was among its most popular sessions. I know several passionate mommy blog fans, but I’ve never counted myself among them. (Perhaps it’s because I don’t know any personally. Mommy bloggers, that is– I know plenty of moms.) So, I was pretty happy last week to learn about my friend Deanna’s blog. (I always enjoy discovering that a real world friend is blogging.) Jet Set Mom is about the travel experiences of a woman with an 18-month old baby named Alex. Last month, Alex hopped into the fountain at the Getty Museum, prompting Deanna to reflect:

At just 18-months, I can see my son is just like me. He wants to do everything and he can do it all by himself. For me, traveling everywhere with Alex means often having to do things his way. He will push his stroller when he wants to, he will choose when to sit in a high chair in a restaurant, and he will jump into fountains now and then. My mother will say, I need to start enforcing some rules. But, I like that Alex has brought out my own inner child that’s been secretly buried since sometime in college. (What would have happened if I had jumped in the fountain then?) As a mom on the road with baby along for the ride, Alex gets strapped down in car seats for extended road trips and dragged through airports. He is forced to tolerate temperatures from 100 degrees to minus 30, and adjust to time zones stretching the globe. So, every now and then….you just gotta jump in, splash around and blow kisses to the crowd.

A round-up of Yearly Kos summaries.Steve Rhodes pointed to Monday’s astonishing Chicago Tribune editorial:

“We might as well admit it up front: The first time we heard of the liberal blogging network known as Daily Kos was when Bill O’Reilly dissed it on his show,” the Tribune editorial page says this morning.

Whoa! The Tribune editorial page had never heard of Daily Kos until . . . last week?!!!

Tribune editorial board, you’re fired.
Daily Kos is only a blogging pioneer and probably the most successful political site on the entire frickin’ Internet. Did you guys sleep through the Howard Dean campaign? You do get the Internet, don’t you?

And you’re going to tell us who to vote for?

Daily Kos is more influential than you are!

What’s worse is . . . Kos was born in Chicago! He went to Schaumburg High School. That’s Tribune Country!

Among Rick Hertzberg’s much-appreciated conference commentary was this nugget:

“There are two thousand people here, every one of them a news junkie, and I haven’t seen one single person—not one—carrying a newspaper.”

Jay Rosen, in Huffington Post, shares his “main conclusion: more respect expressed for the blogosphere, and a little less wariness between the two groups. (But let’s not overstate it.)”

TeddySanFran smells a sell-out– and didn’t like the choice of McCormick Place:

I want the revolutionary, angry, Establishment-challenging, rabble-rousing netroots back. If Netroots Nation sees its new mission as pleasing Traditional Media, or allying with it, or making nice, or merging the two into some amalgam that pleases anyone in the Establishment: then it’s not my Netroots Nation.

In the Washington Post, Jose Antonio Varga shared his final thoughts on the conference.

While the Huffington Post and Fire Dog Lake, both founded by women, are two of the most widely read blogs, the rock stars are mostly men, and many women bloggers complain of sexism and harassment in the blogosphere…

Varga also quotes McClatchy reporter Steven Thomma, who, during the HRC address asked, “Are politicians trying to reach the bloggers? Or are they trying to reach us” — journalists — “through the bloggers?”

Katharine Seelye related the advice that techPresident.com’s Andrew Rasiej’s gave to Nancy Robinson, a Boston gun control activist contemplating starting a blog.

“You are a traditional advocate looking for the traditional entry points, and if you don’t understand the culture of the Internet and the bloggers and their operating system, you’ll have a very hard time,” he said. “If you’re not of their culture, if you’re not blogging, if you’re not adoptive and adaptive, then you don’t exist.”

And, from Markos Moulitsas’ key note speech:

It’s a world in which the gatekeepers in the traditional media, political and activist establishments can be easily bypassed. It doesn’t matter whether the elite think we are respectable or not. They have no right to judge us.

One last note on Hillary Clinton’s visit to the conference on Saturday: I was surprised, but heartened, by the fact that she punted on the question about the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Surprised at her lack of fluency with an important aspect of communications policy; heartened by the fact that she didn’t seem to share the vector of the question, that the Act should be overturned. Yes, the Act resulted in consolidation and decreased competition among phone companies, but talk of repealing it, which began with its passage, is often overly simplistic and fails to take into account our new communications structure.

Three Yearly Kos comments that have caught my eye this afternoon. (Of the three, I think Rick Herzberg is the only one here.)

Ann Althouse ponders the attendance uptick from to 1,500 from lasy year’s 1,200. She’s “surprised there is such a small increase in participants since last year. You’d think the proximity of the election and the glitziness of the guests would have much more effect. [Update: Althouse later added this to her post:

[MORE: I'm told in email that a cap was imposed on the number of participants.]

Rick Hertzberg , from his brand new blog, on how his expectations met with reality: “I was expecting this crowd to look weirder. Not hippie weirder, though I did expect a bit of that, but nerdy weirder. So I was surprised at how extraordinarily normal everyone looked.” (By coincidence, Ezra Klein just gave Hertzberg a shout-out from the stage of the Blogs and Journalism: the new news? panel.)

Josh Marshall, who has been oft-cited but has been rarely sighted here, responded to the hot E.J. Dionne column comparing Kos and Limbaugh, blogs and radio. “The key to understanding all this, I think — and I’ll leave this to another post — is to get a proper handle on the interplay between the media technologies, the wave of organizational fervor that they are both helping to generate and also being sustained by, and the ideological shifts that seem to be sweeping over the body politic. Like then, I think you can hear the rumbling over the horizon.”

After negotiating McCormick Place’s various parking options, I’m here for day 2 of Yearly Kos. (Day 1 thoughts here.) The day’s first panel is Blog Foreign Policy and Networked Public Diplomacy. (Each panel I’ve been at has had lots of smart folk, but I only seem able to focus on one speaker per session.)

Suzanne Nossel of Democracy Arsenal spoke of the attempts by think tanks and policy journals to embrace interactive media: “the elites are trying to crash the gates of the blogosphere.” DA often debates whether it should adopt a more bloggy style and voice, but”we come back to our sweet spot: a measured, analytical approach” to foreign policy issues. She also noted that blogs have demonstrated effects in politics, particularly in hot button campaigns like Lieberman-Lamont [at least in Round 1]– but they have yet to impact policy. She answers a question about Democratic think tanks– Democrats have been out of power, and thus have had time to think and blog. When thought leaders enter government they are unlikely to continue as bloggers. Later, an audience member asked a related question: “Some of you guys are going to be insiders, when that happens …how do you envision working with us out here, the progressive edge of the dem party?” Nossel responded that there will of course be pressure, as there is with the new Congress. ” There will inevitably be compromises and not everyone will be happy.”

I pursued the exhibition hall last night and noticed the loneliness of the Hillary table. (Obama’s and Edwards had lots of folks milling about, and Richardson’s folks had some visitors, though the cookies may have been partly responsible.) But, as Jose Antonio Vargas notes in today’s Post, Obama is the house’s favorite, even given the criticisms that his Pakistan speech has engendered. Yet, the latest NBC/WSJ poll shows Hillary widening her (albeit early) lead and makes manifest the notion that the YK community is a niche one. As Vargas observes, HRC’s presence here

underscores two seemingly contradictory realities: blogs’ growing influence as powerful backroom players in Democratic circles and the fact that they don’t reflect the views of most Democrats, much less the general public.

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YearlyKos is in town and, while I’m not a political blogger and this isn’t my scene, I am into listening to smart people. The second interesting panel of the afternoon, Roots: From Online Organizing to Community Activism, looked at the opportunities, and limitations, of Facebook. (If you haven’t heard of it, Jeff Jarvis likes it.)

I’m no Ethan Zuckerman, so paraphrases follow. (Like Ethan, however, I do score at baseball games.)

Pachacutec spoke of the Roots Project’s successful use of Facebook and accompanying challenges:

 

• •The Facebook infrastructure is easier to manage than is Drupal.
• •Success brings problems:“Once you start scaling” in FB, and reach more than 1,000 members, you can no longer send them messages due to anti-spam restrictions.
• •In FB, no one knows what a perfect app is like; there is no clear model.

Randall Winston of Project Agape spoke about Facebook Causes, which is apparently being used by more than 2 million people and is added by 40,000 users a day.

 

• •The Support Breast Cancer Research Cause has more than 730,000 members and has raised more than $20,000. The recipient, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, didn’t learn of the campaign until it received a $12,000 in the mail. The creator of the Cause started other Causes on the same day– this one took off, the others, also health related, did not. Why?
  
• •Causes builds on FB’s “atmosphere of truthfulness…people are treating FB as an extension of their real life.”
• •Why FB works: people want to be validated and feel good about themselves. Prior to Causes, a group, such as Save Darfur, could reach hundreds of thousands and becomes a trend, but the Save Darfur Coalition had no way to reach out to them.
• In FB, “reaching critical mass is so important;” a large community is needed in order to figure out what works.
• •“We come at it from a very naïve perspective;” want to see Cuases grow into off line engagement
• •Causes don’t’ have the scaling problem that Groups do. Causes media apps are coming.
• •FB is web’s largest photo site, by far.
• •FB “duplicates a social graph.”
• •The “average user logs” on to FB 12-25 times a day.

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Justin Krebs of Living Liberally talked about the relationship between off-line and real world activities. In addition to Drinking Liberally, he mentioned Traction and Bus Project.

 

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• •Not everyone is ready to become a hard core activist; some of us still need bridging moments. Personal connection can be a bridge, a “gateway drug into progressive politics.”
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• •Robert Putnam said little about the internet in Bowling Along; we can now say that the net is not TV, it is not the villain. “It may not be the hero, but it is trending positively.”
• •I prefer face to face, but there are real communities that only exist online.

The panel chair, Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, closed with a comment that seems to be emerging as a theme: “Last year we were struggling to be seen– I just got an email from reproter at MSNBC asking me to link to his blog.”

Jonathan Abrams in the LA Times looks at local bloggers in Southern Cal– and the local officials who resent them.

…Muckraking bloggers say they have stepped in to fill the government watchdog vacuum. Some are anonymous, others are scurrilous and, on occasion, possibly libelous. And to local politicians, most are a royal pain in the tuchis. Bloggers in the San Gabriel Valley have raised the alarm about a possible budget crisis in Sierra Madre; ones in the Inland Empire have written about the high costs of trimming city trees in Claremont and allegations that killers are getting away with murder in Pomona.

“We realize in today’s electronic environment, it’s a fact of life,” said Grand Terrace City Manager Thomas Schwab. “The thing that’s the most disturbing is they can put things on the blog that have no basis in fact, and you really can’t refute it.”… The Foothill Cities Blog, which covers several cities in the San Gabriel Valley…drew the ire of administrators in May after posting that its city manager was forced to step down — which city officials said was untrue.

“It took me back to high school days when you gossip with girlfriends,” said Pomona Mayor Norma Torres, adding that she may start her own blog to communicate directly with constituents. “Some of the information reads like a gossip column.”

Luke Ford has been receiving credit for driving the coverage of Antonio Villaraigosa’s romantic life and his relationship with LA TV reporter Mirthala Salinas.  Here’s the LA Times’ Tim Rutten:

Clearly, the mayor would not be in the fix he’s in — and it’s quite a fix — without the emergence of a vigorous online media that is reshaping the city’s political landscape. Los Angeles mayors Sam Yorty and Tom Bradley were married men who had affairs, which never got into the papers because, even if City Hall reporters had been inclined to pursue the story, it would have been virtually impossible to make it conform to the standards their editors enforced….The news of Villaraigosa’s marital difficulties was broken by a blogger, Luke Ford, then fleshed out by the Daily News, which immediately posted the story on its website. The paper’s editorial page editor set the tone for much of the subsequent commentary by immediately putting up a hysterical screed that, believe it or not, included terms you probably haven’t seen since the last time you read “Elmer Gantry,” words like “homewrecker” and “repent.” All of this has been carefully cataloged and funneled into the national and foreign press by Kevin Roderick’s widely read LA Observed website….Depending on how you look at things, we’re witnessing the digital execution of either decency and discretion or of a culture of excessive deference to power.

Did Ford beat professional reporters to the story, or is he, as an amateur, able to push stories that those who subscribe to professional ethics cannot? “Once called the Matt Drudge of Porn,” Ford was interviewed by LAist last week:

On January 29, I was just shooting the breeze with a fellow journalist and he reported this information about the mayor and that none of the mainstream journalists would be allowed by their editors to publish such a story.

I made some phone calls and sent out some emails and verified that what I had been told — that the mayor’s marriage was kaput — was true.

There seems to be an institutional group think at The Los Angeles Times that it is wonderful to have a hispanic mayor, that it’s wonderful to have a mayor who is a star, and that the mayor deserves the paper’s support….

I believe The Los Angeles Times wastes its resources and is overly fastidious about these types of stories (stories that their journalists on the beat know about but their editors are not interested in publishing)….I’ve never thought the big story is who the mayor’s girlfriend is. The bigger story is who the mayor is and how he operates. The even bigger story is what a lazy and inept monopoly newspaper is The Los Angeles Times, which had to be dragged kicking and screaming into covering the mayor seriously.

In the LA Weekly, David Zahniser says that

l’affaire Salinas is the logical endgame in an increasingly chummy L.A. media circle

and includes La Opinion and its “Alcalde, Yo Pregunto . . .” in his criticism.

A new LA Times/Bloomberg survey highlights what we thought: the blogosphere’s “grassroots revolt” and  netsroots darlings like freshmen Dem Senators Webb and Tester and Rep. Boyda) were not representative of the population as a whole in their opposition of  the Immigration Reform Act. The Times survey:

like previous surveys done by the Times Poll and other organizations, found the public in a much  more forgiving mood toward illegal immigrants than are some Congressional leaders… The poll…. found bipartisan support for an approach to illegal immigration that includes a path to citizenship for certain  illegal residents. By 63% to 23% the public supports allowing undocumented immigrants without a criminal  record who have been living in the U.S. for years to start on a path to citizenship, after registering, paying a  fine, getting fingerprinted, and learning English, among other requirements.   Majorities of Democrats (66%),  independents (66%) and Republicans (65%) agree.

Alas, pro-”amnesty” bloggers were much quieter, or at least (apparently) less effective. Kevin Johnson and the ImmigrationProf Blog, which I learned about thanks to Radio Open Source’s show on the bill’s defeat, seems to be an exception. Marc Cooper, of course, has also been writing about immigration for, well, decades. How much difference the blog power differential really made, who knows?

I love Memeorandum and can admit to a guilty addiction to Techmeme. Gabe Rivera has successfully built four sites (baseball and gossip, too) in which “traditional media,” blogs and all the rest are blended into RSS goodness. But today’s Politico Edwards error demonstrate the problem of an editor-less code-reliant news site. Some five hours after Ben Smith had posted his mea culpa, the top story on Mememorandum continued to be his incorrect “Edwards to Suspend Campaign” story.

Clearly, Ben Smith’s error should not be framed as “the blogs are spreading false information” claim. Never mind that Politico is as close to mainstream as a non-dead tree publisher can be: E&P notes that Politico was not alone:

Outlets falling for it ranged from MSNBC to the Washington Times, which headlined its story “Report: Edwards Suspending Campaigning.” This appeared shortly before his scheduled noon announcement. The Los Angeles Times and Newsday were among many others which also headlined the “suspension” on their sites.

The source for many of the reports was a blog item on Politico.com. The author, Ben Smith, later admitted it was based on a single source and he apologized.

But another source was Reuters, which also had utilized a single source. ABC News’ web site, among others, picked it up after 11 a.m. The Washington Post site carried the Reuters item with the headline: “Edwards to suspend presidential campaign: source.” 

In case anybody needed it, the Washington Post last week provided more proof of the value of professional news gatherers. The two-part series by Dana Priest and Anne Hull on the treatment of outpatients Walter Reed hospital (Part 1 and Part 2) has already resulted in a a Pentagon review, Congressional investigations and hearings, administrative promises and some paint jobs and is likely to receive wide Pulitzer and other critical praise. From the series’ opening graphs:

5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely — a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them — the majority soldiers, with some Marines — have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.

They suffer from brain injuries, severed arms and legs, organ and back damage, and various degrees of post-traumatic stress. Their legions have grown so exponentially — they outnumber hospital patients at Walter Reed 17 to 1 — that they take up every available bed on post and spill into dozens of nearby hotels and apartments leased by the Army. The average stay is 10 months, but some have been stuck there for as long as two years.

What are bloggers, particularly mil bloggers, saying about the Post’s series?

Here are Andi’s thoughts:

While this story does have merit, for every one bad story, and it is bad, there are five hundred stories of hope and inspiration that unfold daily inside the gates of Walter Reed. There are miracle workers who save lives. There are people who give of their time and money to bring joy and cheer to our wounded troops. But alas, these stories are just not sexy enough. Nor do they require covert operations on behalf of reporters.

Mil blogger JR Salzman , living at Walter Reed calls part 1:

definitely the most accurate story on Walter Reed Army Medical Center, my home since Christmas Eve 2006, and for many months to come…No one knows where to go to get things done, what forms are needed, or the SOP for getting anything done. Expect to go to half a dozen different places, getting routed from one office to another before finally landing where you need to, only to have to run around to three or four different offices hunting people down for the necessary signatures. To put it plainly, their system of getting things done is more than “broke”…Over in Iraq I would lead our 20 to 30 vehicle convoys through some of the most dangerous areas on the roads over there. Now I get treated like a little kid, or more so like a normal garrison soldier, not a patient with special needs. It takes me a lot longer to do things because I only have half a hand left. Little things like tying my shoes or zipping my coat are huge obstacles to be overcome. Forget about me putting on a full ACU uniform with boots. I can’t do it myself, so my wife has to help dress me.

Fuzzybear Lioness is more critical, at least of the second article in the series:

the second WaPo article (about Mologne House) was a breathless, vile and agenda-driven piece of **** ; the first WaPo article (about Building 18, an outpatient residential facility) was also breathless and agenda-driven but largely accurate in the issues it raised about the problems at Building 18 and the broken bureaucracy of med boards and treatment/housing for the wounded after their initial hospitalization.

From My Position shares his experiences at Walter Reed:

the chain of command at med hold actually reviews the lists of people going to morale events–to the Pentagon welcome home ceremony, concerts, movies, even Fran Obrien’s–to see if soldiers are able to work. Their thinking: if you can go do this stuff, then you can do work for med hold company. Sitting at a desk doing mindless tasks for eight hours is SO much like visiting the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs for a two hour picnic. It is so bad that they often pair tow cripples together, so they can keep each other awake, despite all the painkillers. It’s also pretty common to see spouses just sitting at the desk with their soldier, to make sure that they are okay–often, the soldiers are unconscious or barely conscious, in their painkiller induced stupor–but they do these jobs because someone decided that they couldn’t just stay in their rooms, and besides, they manage to have the energy to go on these trips, right?

He also has interesting thoughts on the

charities who help the wounded–whether flying them or their families to hospitals, making Velcro clothes so they can dress themselves, helping to take care of the soldier’s kids, getting them a drastically discounted rental vehicle so they can get from hospital to hotel and back, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. Every single gap that a charity had to fill equates to a leadership failure–a failure to recognize the unique needs of the soldiers and their families…. when a wounded soldier has to rely on the sympathy and charity of others to simply live day to day, to meet his most basic needs, then the Army, and the government as a whole, has failed them.