blogger interrupted

Lisa Renee from GCJ gets to the heart of this matter.

If I would have known it was an ODP decision rather than one based on my merits as a blogger I wouldn’t have spent so much time on the application or held out any hope that I would be the one who was selected.

One of the “merits as a blogger” the DNC held out as a metric for state blogger credentials was the age of the blog applying.  The longer you’ve been around, the more likely you’re legit.  Guess which blog in Ohio has been around longer, Buckeye State Blog, or Ohio Daily Blog?

BSB has been around almost a full year longer than ODB.  Not only that, but ODB’s previous incarnation, Ohio2006, went on total hiatus for months before ODB re-emerged.  Based on this metric, and the traffic metric, and the Technorati authority metric, BSB is the only blog in Ohio that has the traffic, the authority, and the staying power that meets the DNC’s stated standards for credentials at the convention.

People seem to think this issue is about Jeff Coryell and how sucky his press release blog is.  It isn’t.  It’s about a process that was created giving the illusion that objective criteria, rather than political pressure, would decide who would sit with the Ohio delegation in Denver.  If a blog that clearly does not meet the criteria laid out by the DNC itself is somehow awarded the credentials, then what is the point of ever “applying”?  Lisa Renee is correct - why should bloggers have any confidence in a process that can merely be trumped by ODP’s political preference?

It’s as if the ODP decided to let NBC News sit with the delegation, and not CBS.  What’s the difference?  They’re both legit, they’re both going to meet some metric.  It’s about politics.  Plain and simple.  And if a major network were denied access due to the whims of the state party doling out the credentials, that network would raise a far bigger stink than a bunch of bloggers ever could.  

ODP needs to fix this.  BSB belongs at the convention in Denver.  Period.

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