Cheyenne blogger steps up

Thursday, May 22, 2008

By Grace Hammond

When the National Democratic Party holds its convention in Denver this August, the delegates won’t just be choosing a presidential nominee. They will also be supporting a new class of political pundits: bloggers.

This year, the Democratic National Convention Committee is bolstering progressive media, or “prog blogs,” according to Michael Shay, a Cheyenne blogger.

Last week, the DNCC announced its creation of the new State Blog Corps and selected Shay, a blogger, fiction writer and essayist, as the Wyomingite who would serve as the state’s single representative to the convention in this pilot program.

The blogger corps program provides one blogger from each state and U.S. territory with media credentials to Denver’s four-day convention. State bloggers will be “embedded” with their state’s delegates and have the chance to stand in the middle of the fray, Shay said.

Shay, a former sports reporter and journalist for The Denver Post, has a 30-year history with writing and reporting, both in print and online. He began posting daily to his political blog at http://hummingbirdminds.blogspot.com/ in 2005.

Blogs allow their authors a kind of freedom that can’t be found anywhere else, Shay said. At a newspaper, “you work for someone - that’s the difference,” he said. Many bloggers, including Shay, are a one-man or one-woman operation. Shay quoted A. J. Liebling of the New Yorker: “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.”
That, Shay said, is the beauty of the blog.

“I post what I want,” he said.
In addition to blogging, Shay serves as an arts specialist with the Wyoming Arts Council and is an active member of the Laramie County Democratic Party.

He isn’t shy about his political affiliations. On the “about me” page of his blog, Shay states that he has “never knowingly voted for a Republican for national office - and never will, as long as the party remains in the clutches of the Fundamentalist Right.”
Shay will serve as a delegate representing Sen. Barack Obama at the state convention in Jackson Hole this weekend. Despite being a man of strong opinions, he has a proven ability to tolerate diverging viewpoints. His wife, Chris, will serve as an alternate delegate for Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Criteria were strict for the more than 400 bloggers who applied for 53 spots, and competition was particularly fierce in the Rocky Mountain Region, said Natalie Wyeth, the press secretary for the Democratic National Convention. The selection committee judged each blog on the quality and relevancy of political content, site visit statistics, and, if applicable, the blog’s history as an online organizing tool or an agent of change, Wyeth said. The new corps focuses on bloggers who cover local and state issues rather than national topics.

“We wanted to represent the growth and influence of bloggers covering local politics - real grassroots advocates in some cases,” Wyeth said. “Many bloggers are not paid to do this. They are passionate about local issues and local politics and they do it on their own time.”

The DNCC created the new state corps in response to the growth in localized blogs that has occurred over the past several years and as an extension of Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy.

State corps bloggers will have an unprecedented level of access to the event. Bloggers like Shay will be seated on the floor amongst their state’s delegates, “where they  will be able to report and blog in real time from their seats on the floor,” Wyeth said.
This year, the party will also be expanding the role of non-state corps bloggers at the national convention.

Bloggers who applied unsuccessfully for credentials with the State Blogger Corps, including several in Wyoming, will have a second chance to blog the convention as part of the General Blogger Pool.

At the 2004 DNC convention in Boston, the party credentialed 30 bloggers, “which was historic at the time,” Wyeth said.

With the increased acceptance of bloggers, “I think we are seeing the DNC trying to reach out to younger voters,” said James D. King, head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Wyoming and an expert on Wyoming politics. Campaigns throughout history have consistently adopted new technologies, he said. For example, three or four election cycles ago, candidates were just beginning to have their own websites and it was “new and novel” but now it is “standard operating procedure for a campaign.”

The Site www.DemConvention.com will feature highlights from the selected blogs leading up to and during the August 25-28 Denver convention.

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