I'll have a recap later of today's modernizing government summit, but this caught my eye. When nothing's happen in the White House press room, at least, the monitor basically becomes a giant RSS reader for the White House blog.

The Financial Times profiles BigGovernment.com's Andrew Breitbart, with a particular focus on where he sees his place in the political news universe:

Clark Hoyt, the [New York Times'] public editor, wrote that it"stood still" after the damning [ACORN] videos were posted online. The newspaper"needs to be alert" to such stories"or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself", he wrote.

The Washington Post also was late to the story."One explanation may be that traditional news outlets like the Post simply don't pay sufficient attention to conservative media or viewpoints," wrote Andrew Alexander, its ombudsman.

Mr Breitbart says his distance from Beltway politics -- he works in the heart of liberal Los Angeles -- allows him to pursue his own agenda."I make no bones about coming from an ideological and partisan point of view. But at least I'm honest about it."

His network of websites includes BigHollywood, which aims to redress liberal bias in Hollywood and provide a forum for rightwing thinkers in the entertainment industry.

“I want to be the kingmaker," says Mr Breitbart."I want to find the best voices so that ideas and truth that have been suppressed for too long can find their way to a mass audience."

The Huffington Post's Nico Pitney's question to President Obama at yesterday's White House press conference has caused quite the stir in certain circles. Well, not so much the question itself -- which asked whether an acceptance of the re-election of Ahmadinejad would constitute a "betrayal" of Iranian demonstrators -- but how the question got to the point of being asked at all. That there was some measure of orchestration behind the exchange was undeniable; Obama called on Pitney by saying "I know that there may actually be questions from people in Iran who are communicating through the Internet. Do you have a question?" And Pitney later described how he solicited questions through readers of his live blog, and through outreach in Farsi on Twitter and the Persian social network Balatarin; the White House saw what he was up to, and got in touch to let him know that he might be called on during the briefing.

It was all too much for some. Politico's Michael Calderone declared that Obama "broke with protocol" by calling on Pitney in between questions from the wire services. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank dispensed with nuance, calling Pitney "a planted questioner." Huffington Post namesake Arianna Huffington pushed back, saying that critics of the exchange "clearly need a nap," and pointing to her own criticisms of the Obama Administration to stand as a proxy for HuffPo's objectivity. White House spokesperson Bill Burton focused on the concept that Pitney's question wasn't his at all, really, but a query channeled through him. "[I]t was an innovative way to get a question directly form an Iranian," said Burton, before getting in a dig at the regular White House press corps: "[H]e ended up asking the toughest question that the President took on Iran."

Our own Ari Melber, writing for The Nation, makes the case that -- leaving aside the desirability of injecting some "regular citizen" perspective into the press process -- White House press conferences aren't exactly a free-wheeling exchange of ideas on any day.

If you dedicated an hour of your life last night to watching Obama's second presidential press conference, then you saw that the way the president ticked through the list of pre-selected reporters made it seem like he could have benefited from the help of a maître d'. "Is Lourdes here?," he asked at one point, one eye on his master press list. Univision's Lourdes Meluza was there, got in a question about violence in Mexico. Obama called on 13 different reporters, including those from specialized publications like Stars & Stripes and Ebony magazine, as well as from all four major TV networks (ABC, CBS, FOX, and CNN). But, Politico's Michael Calderone notes, Obama didn't call on a single reporter from a major newspaper -- no New York Times, no Washington Post, no Wall Street Journal. (The Washington Times did get a question in, but their reach doesn't extend much beyond the Beltway.) Plum Line's Greg Sargent cautions against using last night's press conference to add weight to the idea that Obama is actively trying to route around some sort of traditional media filter. "The fracturing of information channels in the new media age and the weakening power of the big news orgs," he writes, "are driving this as much as anything."

ABC's George Stephanopoulos makes the case that the smaller outlets asked targeted questions -- on homelessness, on veterans affairs -- that wouldn't get asked by more general-interest publications.

Of course, Personal Democracy Forum has partnered up with Ask the President, an effort to add a structured framework to tapping the collective thinking of the American people during these sorts of press rituals. (As of this morning, 5,800 people have voted on 875 questions on ATP.) That's a practice that journalists at the White House last night also subscribe to. NBC's Chuck Todd and ABC's Jake Tapper, as the Nation's Ari Melber notes, have discussed a willingness to solicit citizen questions using tools like blogs and Twitter. But without a more structured way of doing it, there's still a good amount of journalistic gut involved. As Tapper tweeted just before the press conference began, ""thx 4 all the great q's...am bringing into briefing 32 pp of q's." With time for only one or perhaps two queries of the president, though, wrote Tapper, "will have to call an audible."

The Next Right's Patrick Ruffini is warning conservative allies about the coming press-pocalypse. Using Bobby Jindal as a model, Ruffini traces attempts to "delegitimize and destroy up-and-coming Republicans" as they resonated through Daily Kos to Keith Olbermann to Talking Points Memo to Politico to the general political consciousness. Oh, he's not upset about it. He wants it. Conservative commentators need to get off their lazy behinds, says Ruffini, and start reporting. His commenters aren't so sure. Some argue that stories about Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers were just too fluffy to get traction. Others make the point that GOP leadership is too weak to do the aggressive oppo pushing that a party in opposition needs to do to earn its version of events an airing. Writes commentator "Cahnman": "Here's a much simpler solution: Don't nominate John McCain ever again."