Blogger Jazz Fest

Mary Conley

Back when New Orleans was still alive and kicking, I went to many a Jazz Fest. The problem with the event was its embarrassment of riches. It may have been part of its planning that you were invariably torn between two of the nine stages at certain parts of the day as performers you wanted to see were frequently playing simultaneously and on opposite sides of the fairgrounds. They may have scheduled it that way for crowd control. You rushed to get food in you between running to stages and grabbed a beer to go.

YearlyKos had the same phenomenon, though without the food and beer. As with Jazz Fest, I'll be better prepared next year for the marathon. By the end of each day, it was all I could do to drag myself to happy hour and dinner, my brain worn from trying to absorb all the information being thrown at me… my throat a little sore from non-stop fervent conversations in the halls.

With an event like this to its credit, blogging has certainly arrived.

My goal for the conference was to learn as much as I could about the blogosphere and what its value was for communicating ideas, since that's my business. I still find myself explaining what a blog is to clients and anyone else who doesn't understand this new venue for my writing. So I was looking for facts, statistics, anecdotes that could act as fables to impart.

That helped me chart my course through the days. I had to sacrifice seeing Michael Schiavo speak about keeping the religious right out of your life (unlikely to happen to me) so I could get to "Surveying the Netroots," where I found out the first stats that seem to have been gathered on who's reading blogs and what their value is.

I didn't have to give up seeing Joe Wilson offer his thanks to Empty Wheel, the blogger who grabbed hold of Plamegate and has run with it. Murray Waas was also on the panel, wearing the burden of being the only "mainstream" reporter in Washington still following the story on a daily basis.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the weekend was the tide of emotion that swept through both panelists and audience during sessions like those. When Joe Wilson offered his thanks to Empty Wheel and all of us bloggers who won't let the story of his wife's outing go, you really felt he meant it. And when Barbara Boxer later that day thanked the Ambassador for telling the truth about his experience in Niger, it was a sincere moment between a politician and a diplomat. A rare thing?

I won't do the litany of sessions I went to because that would take up pages on Blue Oregon, but what I learned will certainly inform all my upcoming posts. Moveon.org is still crunching the numbers from a poll they did of bloggers last week before the event, and I'll report them when they're complete.

In general, I was glad to hear a lot of what I'd heard at the previous week's Democratic convention in Eugene confirmed. Health care is going to be a huge topic this election cycle. Everyone's radar is up about turn-out this November, because turn-out wins in off-year elections. And blogs have a big role to play in turn-out. From conversations with the waiters, the security guards and others listening to us in the halls, our message is resonating with lots of folks who wouldn't necessarily consider themselves political junkies.

One of the more interesting lessons I got was that there is a difference between how Republicans and Democrats use blogs. Dems now cluster in a few big blogs (DailyKos, Atrios, Firedoglake…. and Blue Oregon, of course), but Republicans spread out their blog-readership through many more, smaller blogs that are linked. The value of blogs in state-wide politics is in finding local bloggers who are connected because of common interests – fishing, knitting, parenting, etc. - and connecting them to politics. The key to increasing the power of blogs as a political tool is finding those smaller bloggers, reaching them with your message, and linking everyone up.

So, if you are reading this and you have a blog – whatever the topic – please email me and I'll work on the equivalent of Washington State's "WashBlog." Next year at YearlyKos, we can all wear bright green t-shirts like the bright orange WashBlog one I'm wearing right now, with a huge list of statewide blogs on the back.

The other big lesson you couldn't help but get from this weekend was actually the opposite of what Maureen Dowd wrote about in her op-ed piece in the Times. I woke up Sunday morning with this revelation in my head and, of course, fired off a letter to the Times about it. I'm not holding my breath that it will get published.

Sen. Harry Reid told us Saturday night that he and other politicians will be looking to the blogosphere to locate and disseminate the truth from now on. (Not surprising, given the fact that the stats show bloggers are both highly educated and highly obsessed their topics.) Dowd's thesis was that we bloggers want her job, that we want to be the mainstream media.

My reply was she had it turned around: mainstream media has so failed its audience by abandoning its responsibility to be guardians of the truth that their readers have turned to the blogosphere to find it. Nature abhors a vacuum, and all the blogger PhDs, attorneys, and wonks have stepped in to fill the void. It's not we who want the job of being reporters, it's America who wants us to do it.

The final lesson of the weekend is that politics is not dead. Idealism is not dead. And those who want to take back our country aren't powerless anymore. We've found our voice and each other. Those of us at the conference may just be the most fervent of the crowd. The interfaith prayer service Sunday morning found us all spontaneously moving together and reaching out our hands to connect as we sang We Shall Overcome. It's corny to tell you about it now, in the glare of this hot sunny morning in Las  Vegas, but then the room was full of people moved by emotion. The preachers spoke of the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the mentally ill, the troops and all hurt by this Administration's policies who are ignored in the current political climate. There were more than a few tears in the room.

And when the day was over, we found ourselves sad to be leaving each other. More than one person mentioned it seemed like the last day of summer camp, but it was more than that. It felt like a wave of hope finally rising and carrying the ship we've all been prisoners on at long last starting to turn towards home.

By Mary Conley June 12, 2006