I've been trying to contact Aaron Myers of the DNCC all day to find out what's going on with the blog credentials, but surprisingly, he's not answering his phone. He did put up a diary on Dailykos in which he seemed to suggest that state parties had no role in the process. Here's what he wrote.
We didn't hand off this project to state party officials, as was rumored. The DNCC published a list of requirements, we read applications, and we looked at lots of blogs.
As it turns out, I did talk to Matt Jerzyk of the credentialed blog Rhode Island Future, and he had a conversation with state party executive director Tim Grilo about the blog credentialing process. He asked about the process of credentialing bloggers. Grilo said that the DNCC called and asked for the party's input about each blog that applied, and the Rhode Island Democratic Party was told directly that their input would be valued and would be involved in the decision-making process about who to credential. Grilo said that the party was not given veto power but he did get the strong sense that their input would be a valuable part of the credentialing process.
In broad strokes, Jerzyk outlined for me, what this means is that there was no veto power by state parties and the decision resided with the Democratic National Convention Committee, but yes, state parties had input and yes state parties could give negative information about blogs they didn't like. |
| Myers is a good technical guy, but he does not have a strong background working with blogs and bloggers. I actually asked him about a year ago, when he was the internet director for the John Edwards campaign, whether he read blogs, and he said he didn't have time. Jenni Engebretsen, his boss, is the person in charge of PR for the convention, and she is a former RIAA spokesperson with substantial problems with the tech blog Boingboing.
When I asked Myers about whether state parties had influence, here's what he said.
When we were soliciting applications, the DNCC contacted state parties for help in growing our blog applicant pool.
In fact, if you talk to many of the folks who applied, they'll tell you they learned first about the credentialing program through their state party. We ended up with more than 200 state blog applicants. So I'd say the parties were helpful in getting the word out.
It's just incorrect to say that anyone outside of the Convention staff had some sort of "veto power".
This is clearly designed to make us think that state parties had no influence in the process, and played a marketing role at most. And that is, while perhaps not a lie, quite close to bad faith.
I think I kind of figured out what happened. Myers and Engebretsen basically don't understand new media or progressive blogs, and went out and asked state parties about their local blogospheres. In some cases, they followed the recommendations of the state parties, in others, they didn't. They credentialed a wide range of blog types, from nonpartisan media outlets to activist progressives to random press release repositories without any sense of what they were doing. State parties didn't have official veto power, but there was no one internally at the DNCC who would advocate for progressive bloggers like Juan Melli of Blue Jersey, who last night was awarded a party-building award from the Hoboken Democratic Party, along with the New Jersey Democratic Party Chair Joe Cryan but has a history of criticizing the New Jersey Democratic Party's history of unfairly privileging Clinton over Obama (and pissing off the party managers that Myers called for input into who to credential).
This led to a chaotic process open to corruption and bad decision-making. In some cases, as in Michigan, the decision to credential an employee of the Michigan Democratic Party and not an older blog was simply questionable. In other cases, as in Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Alabama, and Democrats Abroad, the decision overtly hurt progressive activists.
It is rather appalling at this point in the Democratic Party's history that the DNCC can't get a good blogger operation together. The lack of transparency in how blogs were selected, the lack of awareness that they are dealing with a community rather than a medium, and the overt conflicts of interest they never bothered to even consider are problems. Myers and his posts on Dailykos in which he acknowledges none of this, and even tries to suggest state parties had no influence, are even worse.
I did the credentialing at the 2004 convention, so I knew something about this. I even sat down with the former blog outreach specialist of the DNCC and suggested at the time that state blogs be credentialed and that the credentials be based on their capacity for social change and not on their credibility as neutral media outlets, and it looks like that was the plan. (I originally wanted blogs who had Actblue pages to be privileged in the process, but that didn't happen.) Still, the original credential criteria was spelled out as follows:
Bloggers must submit their daily audience and list their authority based on Technorati stats. Bloggers may also provide examples of posts that make their blog stand out as an effective online organizing tool and/or agent of change.
It's quite clear that the DNCC has a lot of room for improvement. For a few days, the eyes of the country will be focused on Denver, and it's better to call out mistakes like this now, and silly attempts at spin, then have them happen when the convention is going. |
