Should "Bloggers" Bother Getting Briefed?
BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, March 9 2010
Credit: John Aravosis (from a trip to the White House in February)Kevin Drum wonders if the sort of semi-off-the-record "blogger" briefing with Tim Geithner and other administration officials the Treasury Department organized for yesterday is really worth putting on the tie and/or good shoes for, as people like Felix Salmon, Megan McArdle, Matthew Yglesias, John Aravosis, Duncan Black, and Sam Stein did. Are these just dog and pony shows? Or does actual news get collected, relationships built, readers served? Writes Drum, who blogs on MotherJones.com:
Was it genuinely interesting, or just a bunch of the same-old-same-old? What's the verdict on this ancient Washington tradition?
The American Prospect's Tim Fernholz, who was part of the the event yesterday, pushes back against some of Drum's assumptions. First off, says Fernholz, there was genuine news gathered, but more than that, there's not much "ancient Washington tradition" being witnessed here:
[W]hat Drum doesn't understand is that this isn't an ancient Washington tradition; the SAO insistence [i.e., identifying participants only as "Senior Administration Officials"] is actually a legacy of recent partisanship.
In other words, the days of a reporter dropping by some administration official's office and not reporting all that she sees, hears, and reads there are long done and gone -- in part because of a new media culture shaped by, yep, bloggers! But not all bloggers, of course, which points to some of the weakness in doing something like a "blogger briefing" at all, rather than treating bloggers on a case-by-case based on what it is they do (report, analyze, take sides, use profanity).
But that, of course, can change. Because these are blogs. Quite a conundrum for White House and bloggers alike.
While we're on the topic of visits to the White House and the like, the Families and Work Institute's Ellen Galinsky reports on HuffPo (via @morraam) reports that at yesterday's International Women's Day event at the White House, "almost everyone in the rows around me was bent down looking at their BlackBerries or their iPhones." Wonder if the "bloggers" around Geithner's table behaved similarly.