McJoan's Take on Blogger, Journalist Interaction At YearlyKos 2007
Joan McCarter, a DailyKos contributor who writes under the name mcjoan, describes in an August 7, 2007, post at the NewWest.Net/Politics group blog called “Diary of a Mad Voter,”how the three moderators of the second annual YearyKos Convention handled the Presidential Leadership Forum staged in Chicago on August 4, 2007. Seven of eight Democratic presidential candidates showed up at the convention, which ran August 3, 2007 to August 5, 2007
The moderators were "New York Times Magazine’s Matt Bai, Kossack, Frameshop proprietor, and author Jeffrey Feldman, and McCarter. She said they "had hoped that the Presidential Leadership Forum would be more interesting, substantive, and interactive than previous [Democratic and Republican presidential] debates." Adds McCarter:
We tried to go for questions that would speak more to leadership and governing philosophy than hot-button issue reactions. Many of the topics covered in previous debates—as important as they may be—had already been talked out, and we were highly unlikely to learn anything new from them. On the issues previously addressed, we tried to come at them from an angle that would hopefully get us something new.We wanted to try to force candidates out of their stump speech talking points--to set them a little on edge and try to force an informative conversation out of that discomfort. We were only partly successful—they have a hell of a lot more practice at this than us, and can turn a question on a dime into the one they want to answer. Even so, up there on stage, it felt like we had the most lively, engaged debate yet among these candidates.
McCarter's conclusion about bloggers, so-called mainstream journalist and political news coverage is found in her opening paragraph, which states: "The second annual YearlyKos convention has come and gone, and with it the days when bloggers could be dismissed by traditional media as some kind of fringe element. The coverage of the convention has reflected the reality that the community of bloggers and citizen journalists are highly informed, intelligent, and civically minded."
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