Political blogs excite journalists

NPR’s ombudsman eats crow after dissing blogs.

E&P reports on TPM blogger of the year award.

SF Chronicle says political insiders watch blogs like DailyKos. Here’s one enthusiastic insider/blog reader:

“I’m a reader. I think Markos has done an incredible job,” said the president of the New Democrat Network, Simon Rosenberg, a centrist who worked in Bill Clinton’s famous “war room” during the 1992 campaign and continued working for Clinton throughout his presidency. “Kos is one of the places I go for full-time information every day,” Rosenberg said. “If people like me do that, you know it’s having an impact.”

Tallahassee Democrat says:

“Blogs are the biggest communication innovation for the 2004 election,” wrote Alexis Rice, author of a recent blog study at Johns Hopkins University. “Blogs are transforming campaign communication and will become not only an important tool in the presidential election, but in future state and local elections.”

Before receiving his award yesterday, Josh Marshall reports, Josh tried to explain blogs to Arthur Schlesinger, one of Josh’s heros. He wanders over to the great historian and his wife and starts babbling.

To be polite Schlesinger’s wife asked me to explain to them just what a blog is. And though I get this question pretty often, it turns out to be a rather challenging one if the people you’re trying to explain it to don’t necessarily have a lot of clear web reference points to make sense of what you’re saying. I ended up telling them that it was something like political commentary structured like a personal journal with occasional reporting mixed in. Now, as I was explaining and watching the looks on everyone’s faces it was incrementally becoming clear to me that this was playing rather like saying that something was like a washing machine structured like a rhinoceros with the occasional sandwich thrown in. And, as Schlesinger himself had said rather little through all this, it was also dawning on me that being one of the four guests of honor at this little event was providing no guarantee against making a bit of a fool of myself.