I’ve been scouting out the best online news resources for following the Democratic Party convention in Denver, other than the well-known, corporate news operations (that I generally avoid anyway), which I think we can all find on our own. Below is what I’ve found so far, and I’ll add to the list as I come across others.
Note: If you only care about the Oklahoma angle, jump down here.
The official convention site is worth a look for speaker schedules, logistics, last minute updates and the like.
This is the first convention where bloggers are more than an afterthought, so check out the official list of bloggers credentialed by the Party. These independent (that is, not Party funded; all are fiercely partisan Democrats) bloggers will be “embedded” with their state delegations, so as to bring all the surprise and spontaneity of the convention to life for their readers back home. (Seriously, it’s a good thing, and probably demonstrating much more integrity than that other embedding project the government tried with the media a few years back.)
The Big Tent – there is literally something called “The Big Tent” (subtle enough for you, Dems?) serving as bloggers central for the convention; this site is not for news reporting apparently (bloggers do have their own outlets, after all), but for coordinating use of the facility. Still interesting for those of us into the meta stuff. This not run by the Party, but by a group of bloggers and sponsors like Digg and Google.
Just to keep everyone confused with information overload, some of the credentialed state blogs (including Oklahoma’s), along with some non-credentialed ones, decided to aggregate their convention reports on yet another site, Roots Wire.
DemConWatch is an independent blog run by grassroots Democrats that has a pretty thorough background and coverage of the event — including live cams! And check out the DNC history links in the sidebar
Colorado sites that will probably have major resources dedicated to the convention.
- Politics West – Denver Post site for convention coverage
- Rocky Mountain News another mainstream newspaper
- Colorado Independent
- Square State
- Colorado Indymedia
A number of netroots/Democratic/progressive sites have dedicated sections for convention news, and have folks on the ground there.
Plus, some really good news: Democracy Now! will expand to two hours live broadcast on radio and tv for the next two weeks, covering both conventions. Unless you live at or near UCO, you’ll have to pick the show up after the fact on the web, but it’s worth it. Their in-depth interviews are unequaled.
If you’re on Twitter, you can follow the Twitter Search tag #dnc08 that Twitterers in Denver at using to flag their tweets. Or, the Denver Post has a dedicated Twitter account for convention related updates, The DNC – a warning though: this is high-volume so you may just want to visit the page once or twice a day, rather than follow and hve your timeline completely swamped.
Okies in Denver
Last but not least, there’s the Oklahoma credentialed blog team, Calvin and Tim from DemoOkie Forum. Yes, Oklahoma’s credentialed blog is a forum, but I think it was an apppropriate selection, since it is the major site for the grassroots of the state Democratic Party. Anyway, thanks to Howard Dean, they will be right there in the Pepsi Center and INVESCO Field with the Oklahoma Delegation.
I’m very happy to see that the boys, once selected, actually realized they would need a real blog to pull this off, rather than trying to stretch that Snitz 2000 forum, which is already distorted way beyond its intended purpose (bless ’em, they do keep things hopping over there, it’s just clumsy and ugly as shit, and about as state-of-the-art as Windows 98, and I obsess about those things). I’m hoping they’ll like the new format so much that they will come home and do a complete overhaul of their site once Barack has moved in at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. with Michelle and the girls.
Tim posted about their plans for Denver:
f you want Gavel to Gavel, watch the news. It will be better than we can do. However, since we are embedded with the Oklahoma Delegation, we will be with them all day. You will get to meet them and see what really happens at these conventions. Delegates usually start with a breakfast at 7:30 am and continue until late night. I know when I went to Boston I was exhausted when I came back. You’ll go with them to receptions, caucuses and just hanging around.
We’ve brought digital cameras, digital videos and digital audio recorders. We plan on making a few of the attendees YouTube stars. Dr. Earl Mitchell from Stillwater has been drafted again as a special correspondent. We also will be sharing photos taken by the delegates themselves.
Hopefully we will fulfill Howard Deans vision of bringing the other parts of the convention home. We look forward to the opportunity.
If you want a down and dirty compilation of news out of Denver, check the sidebar of DenverOkie.com, there’s a list of the latest news headline from all the state bloggers, as well as the RootsWire feed. For any normal person, that will be more than enough! (I of course, am not normal and will be trying to go to every site for every last pixel of information.)
Tim and Calvin say they are making their photos and reports available to Oklahoma media. I hope they mean new/digital as well as old/dead-tree media, or I’ll really have to give them a netroots/open-source whup-ass tutorial, if they don’t get one in Denver first (which I suspect they might).
This list is by no means definitive! It’s just a starting point. If you have other links to offer, please post in comments.
Update: How could I forget C-Span!?!
Another Twitter collective: DNCjournalists
Well done! Thanks for this.
Well done! Thanks for this.