ON THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION: NEW MEDIA STREAM INTO AN OLD TRADITION

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
NEW YORK TIMES ON LINE
Published: August 27, 2008

DENVER — The musician Will.I.Am, who produced the hit video “Yes We Can” for Barack Obama, calls the Democratic gathering here the first “batonical” convention.

That’s not botanical, as in gardens, but batonical, as in baton and the passing of: The Democratic National Convention is the first in which people are passing on enormous amounts of information to friends, who are in turn passing it to more friends, mostly by way of YouTube, the superhighway’s video conveyer belt, which didn’t exist during the 2004 convention.

Will.I.Am, who is a rapper with the Black-Eyed Peas, made his observations about the new media during a panel discussion today not far from the Pepsi Center, which is a showcase for how the new media is mixing with — and altering — old politics in an age of declining attention from the big television networks. It also shows how the new media can help the party reach audiences unfiltered by the old media.

This convention was ushered in with a text message last weekend to millions of Obama supporters telling them that Mr. Obama had picked Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., as his running mate. It will close with a giant phone bank at Invesco Field, where 75,000 people will be asked to use their cell phones to call potential supporters. In the process, the campaign will be capturing the phone numbers of tens of thousands of people sitting in the stands who have not yet become part of Obama Nation.

The convention has jazzed up its communications in several ways, all because of advances in technology that are expanding the audience way beyond the reach of television and newspapers.

For one thing, it has added an online component to its popular in-house studio, a glassy, cluttered, jam-packed hub just off the convention floor where elected officials can hook up with their local radio hosts or television anchors back home. Both parties have had something similar in the past, but this year, the Democrats’ nerve center, called Studio’08, features computers with Wi-Fi so that pols can also do online chats with their constituents.

“This is a one-stop shop,” Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri said cheerily as she prepared for a satellite television interview. “I can do talk radio here, I can do satellite feeds, I can do on-line stuff, I can do actualities. It’s very convenient. It makes it simple to talk to people at home — and it’s a great way to get around those nasty ads. People can actually get real information if they just take a little energy and click a few times.”

With its steady stream of politicians on the airwaves and online, Studio’08 also helps the Obama campaign counter the heavy media presence of surrogates for Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. So far, Studio’08 has transmitted more than 200 satellite interviews to 90 media markets.

Also new this year is a Web site www.demconvention.com that shows the first live high-definition streaming of gavel-to-gavel convention proceedings, using the same new Microsoft platform that made its debut at the Olympics. The site offers a complete Spanish-language simulcast, for the first time.

The site features its first daily convention Web cast, which previews that night’s program and serves up convention tidbits — snippets of Michelle Obama’s video in advance, for example — and includes “by the numbers” tallies, like the gallons of coffee made and miles of cable laid.

Speaking of numbers, the log of credentialed bloggers this year has more than tripled, to 120 from 35 in 2004, the first year they were allowed in.

And bloggers now have a rotating position on the podium, just as print and television reporters have. The convention has also created a state blogger corps, giving credentials to one blogger from each state, a system that has irked many who felt it unnecessarily limited their number.

But Google, DailyKos and others are sponsoring a “Big Tent” within a short walk of the Pepsi grounds where hundreds of bloggers are sitting shoulder to shoulder at long tables and pounding on their keyboards and taking video of each other most of the day and night. It cost them $100 for a space for the week. It’s air-conditioned and does not involve security lines: the only line is for media types who are not blogging but coming in for a look. They have to sign in at a table marked “Traditional Media,” not the most welcome group in bloggerland.

Typical of the material being sent back home are postings (“Live from Denver!”) by Brian Rothenberg on ProgressOhio.

“Through the use of state-of-the-art Internet and cell-phone technology,” his promo says, “Brian is providing live interviews with Ohio delegates and party officials which we are posting on our website for you to see and get an insiders’ view of the convention not provided by the TV hosts, newspapers or other blogs.”

The convention also has its own blogging team. The 2004 convention had a blogger too; the difference this year is that there is a team and it also posts lots of videos (remember — YouTube did not exist four years ago).

All of this is backed by a huge online communications team that includes dozens of volunteers. On Monday night, they used several cameras to record Ms. Obama’s speech, said Chris Hughes, 24, a co-founder of Facebook who has brought his social-networking skills to the Obama campaign and is now its director of online organizing.

They put her speech up on YouTube in two or three hours and sent it out by e-mail early the next morning to millions of Obama supporters. The hope was that many of them would forward the speech to other friends.

“We weren’t just pushing information out, but getting people to post it to their profiles,” Mr. Hughes said during an interview in the convention hall. He said that major speeches like hers can become extremely popular, as did the race speech that Mr. Obama delivered in Philadelphia in the spring. That 35-minute-long speech remains the most-watched video of the Obama campaign on YouTube.

“It’s not just YouTube, but all these networks make it easier for people to share information, and video is probably the best medium for that,” Mr. Hughes said. “This is all so integral to fundraising and organizing. Having good video has made a difference, and so has having the resources of Facebook and MySpace and MyBarackObama too. Half the delegates here have MyBO accounts.”

This is the kind of activity that Will.I.Am meant when he talked about batoning. At the panel discussion, which was sponsored by the Huffington Post, he searched for a metaphor to describe the differences between what he said was the passive, old media and the engaged new media.

“You watch old media on the couch,” he said. “This new media is horse material. You travel and you tell people and it’s like Paul Revere.”