Archive: Year: 2005

Two of our own contributing editors, Michael Bassik and Mike Krempasky, have been busy this past week organizing bipartisan coalition of bloggers, online journalists and political consultants seeking to head off any "crackdown" by the Federal Election Commission on blogging and other forms of online political expression. The letter is now out, and and if you want to add your name to the signatories, go to the OnlineCoalition.com. Not only is this a bipartisan list (including yours truly and two other PDFers, Brian Reich and Matt Stoller) but the very issue of blogging freedom brought together the conservatives at RedState.org (which owns the domain name for the site), the Deaniacs at EchoDitto (which designed and built the site), and the...

Phil Noble of PoliticsOnline just handed Joe Trippi $100 cash up on the plenary panel of the IPDI "Politics Online" conference, as instant affirmation of Joe's longstanding argument that someday soon a candidate for President is going to go on the Internet and issue a call to millions of Americans to run a campaign financed solely by small donations of no more than $100. The gesture got a big laugh from the crowd, and for good reason. Yesterday, I met with my old boss and friend Ellen Miller, who is now deputy director at the Campaign for America's Future, but prior to that, before founding Public Campaign (where we worked together) was the founder of the Center for Responsive Politics, the...

Kerry voters were two-and-a-half times as likely to participate in online discussions or chat groups about the election than Bush voters, almost twice as likely to register their opinions in online surveys, and four-and-a-half times as likely to contribute money online to a candidate, according to the just-released Pew Internet study. Remember the "gender gap"? Now it looks like there's an "Internet gap." Patrick Ruffini, Bush-Cheney '04's webmaster, has helpfully placed the relevant chart on his blog, and he argues that, contrary to appearances, there's mixed news for the left in this finding. Democrats, he suggests, "tend to excel at the web-only kind" of e-activism, "while the Republicans focus on building powerful synergies between the online and the offline." He continues: And...

I just had an interesting chat with Garance Franke-Ruta of the American Prospect about her new article "Blogged Down," which details how conservatives have been working the political blogosphere in recent months. Most of the conversation was off-the-record, though I think it would be fair to characterize it as me trying to convince Garance that her frame of "originally pristine citizen-blogosphere corrupted by stealth Republican political operatives" was a misreading of events, and her defending the traditional lines dividing old-fashioned reportorial journalism from online opinionating/activism and arguing that not all political blogging was as innocent or independent a phenomenon as the hype would have it. I called Garance because I have generally enjoyed her reporting--she was one of the best of...