The Next Big Thing: Threat or Promise?

By: Jesse Oxfeld There's a tradition at The Morning Call, the Tribune-owned daily in Allentown, Pa., of hosting news-related speakers and panels. These events are part of the paper's effort, as Mike Foux, vice president of marketing and planning, puts it, to be "the ultimate information provider in the community." So with Election Day approaching, it seemed natural to host an event related to the presidential race.

But when the newspaper's organizers realized that "the only speakers left were irrelevant, too expensive, or hired by the campaigns," according to Chris Krewson, a multimedia editor, they settled on an unusual idea: Rather than having political actors talk about the campaign, the Morning Call invited political bloggers.

"Blog the Vote: How Politics, Journalism and the Internet Mix" was the result, a panel discussion held Oct. 19 at nearby Moravian College. The Morning Call flew in three of the country's top political bloggers ? Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox from Washington, D.C., Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas Z?niga from California, and Power Line's John Hinderaker from Minnesota ? for a lively and serious discussion of presidents, politics, and new media vs. old.

They talked about whether blogging is journalism ("People who want to be journalists will call themselves journalists. I don't. I do commentary," said Cox); about political talk shows ("On talk shows, they just throw out unsupported assertions," whereas bloggers have to back things up with links to sources, said Moulitsas); and about the future of media ("If I ran a newspaper, I'd be very concerned that I have millions and millions of dollars invested in technology that's essentially obsolete," said Hinderaker).

There is a graybeard concern that blogs can't really be trusted, and bloggers are often perceived as loose cannons. On the panel, Cox compared some of her work to "throwing spitballs from the back of the class." But a poster in the auditorium's lobby advertising an appearance the next week by Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson of CNN's "Crossfire" made it seem almost certain that the show put on by those so-called "real" commentators would in fact be more shticky, more choreographed, less insightful, and less revealing.

Beyond an informative discussion, the Morning Call recognized another potential advantage of having a panel of bloggers: It could be a way of reaching out to new readers. "We know young people are reading blogs," said multimedia editor Krewson, "and we know they're not reading newspaper sites the way we hope."

To that end, the panel was heavily promoted among the large college-student community in the Lehigh Valley area. Perhaps because it was a rainy night, or because "it was hard for us to find a way to promote it that told people what it was," as Krewson says, turnout was unimpressive, with about 75 attendees."It was such a great event, it was disappointing that not enough got to see it," says Foux.

But the event may have served an even more important purpose for the newspaper. "It definitely raised the consciousness level in-house of what blogs are and what they can do," says Krewson. After all, a recent survey of active newspaper readers by the Associated Press Managing Editors' National Credibility Roundtables Project found that 20% of respondents read blogs for news.

Russell Glitman, the Morning Call's online editor who runs the paper's Web site with four other editor/producer/ designer-types, notes that in wake of the event ? and after a successful blog by a reporter during the summer's Republican convention ? the paper (like others around the country) is looking to add blogs to its online offerings. Several are planned for the Web companion to a new youth section scheduled to launch soon, and there's "definite interest" in having the panel's moderator, Harrisburg correspondent John L. Micek, start a blog from Pennsylvania's capital.

And, at the very least, the October event brought the paper a little credibility for hipness. "I have been teaching at Lehigh University for three years, and this is the first time I have witnessed such a cutting-edge event in the Lehigh Valley," wrote Amardeep Singh, an assistant professor of English, in a letter to the editor of the Call. "I hope there will be more like it soon."