US political handlers pay attention to blogs in a big way.
And pundit bloggers for the most part want them too.

It has been tried in Canada - a Conservative Party candidate had a blog up within hours of announcing her candidicy. We’ll see more of it.
The US conventions are giving out media passes to some select bloggers.
And this LA Times reporter has some things to say about that. His sense of conflict is obvious, but I kind of think he is missing the point.
Then again, I kind of think bloggers miss the point sometimes to.
I don’t see blogs as competition for media, nor as alternative. I don’t think anyone is going to co-opt anybody.

However, bloggers, with few exceptions, don’t add reporting to the personal views they post online, and they see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject. That encourages these common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar.

I’ve been in a few bars with fellow journalists. We’ve been know to be blustering know-it-alls.

Presumably many Americans, especially young ones, will look for something with more spice and feistiness, which means they may well be looking at blogs and no doubt adding their own kibitzing via the medium’s famed interactivity. This can be fun, and it can also be important. It was political bloggers and their fans who insulted and harassed and eventually embarrassed the major media into paying attention to the comments suggesting racism that Mississippi’s Sen. Trent Lott made at South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party. Media coverage forced Lott’s resignation as Republican leader in the Senate, but it was bloggers who badgered the media until they did their job.

Journalists increasingly read blogs to pick up tips. Blogs have become a network of capillaries that feed the nation’s veins of information. For that reason, blogging’s freewheeling, unfettered style makes it a juicy target for manipulation.

During the Canadian federal election I noticed the paid political surfers come over to check things out. That’s nice if they keep things in perspective, I’m not an opinion shaper like Colby Cosh or Andrew Coyne. I have no desire to be. Many bloggers do want their writing to pay off in the way working media does.
I agree with this reporter that bloggers are very easy targets for manipulation.
By the same token reporters can use their blogs to push their commerical work.

However, if history is any indicator, such earnestness will attract those who would exploit it, and they include some canny, inventive people. There is already talk of bloggers who would consider publishing items for cash and commercial blogs that tout products.

I got a pitch email yesterday. I agreed, not because I particularily cared for the the pitch, but because I like the blogger, and if I can help ‘get the book’ out there a bit, I will.I think my blog may be an inadequate type of market, but what do I know? I do know it’s going to be harder for bloggers to resist the pitches, the economics and the embedding. And many won’t want to.

Blogging is especially amenable to introducing negative information into the news stream and for circulating rumors as fact. Blogging’s fact-checking apparatus is just the built-in truth squad of those who read the blog and howl loudly if they wish to dispute some assertion. It is, in a sense, a place where everyone has his own truth.

In agreeing blogs are easy targets, I don’t think bloggers are as er, stupid or unintentional as this peice tries to paint them.

Blogs and US Politics
I got a very loooong email from a US pundit-blogger.
So long in fact, I didn’t get past the first paragraph - skimmed to the bottom and clicked on the link.
I checked the header to find out that Joyful Christian, Joshua Claybourn and Martin Roth all got the same one.
I feel kind of bad for the guy. He has an agenda, and his approach is self-defeating because he didn’t do basic checking.
Not in sending an email, but the length, tone, content and who he sent it to.
Martin lives in Australia and is on sabbatical. I live in Canada. What this blogger is pushing is of no interest to anyone outside the US. And I think the way he pushed won’t get him too much interest in the US either. He’ll learn as we all do.