I hate hosting parties. I'm generally bad at it and it stresses me out. As a result, I don't really have any involvement with mediabistro's usual party hosting and planning. But I agreed to do the launch parties for the new blogs, so last Monday we officially "launched" FishbowlNY.com, even though the site has been live since January. (This is, of course, in keeping with historical precedent. We launched Gawker in December of '02 and threw the launch party in February of '03.) The weather was nasty—blizzard-y, in fact—but the turnout was great.
For added self-referential meta-ness, Gawker covered the party. Their excellent photographer, Nikola, shot these photos.
On Monday morning my DC media gossip blogger for mediabistro, Garrett Graff began his quest for a White House press pass for the daily gaggle, which Scott McClellan, following the Jeff Gannon/James Guckert scandal, had said any qualified reporter could easily get by going through the normal procedures. After four days of calling and faxing, the White House press office issued Garrett a pass, making him the first blogger to get credentialled by the White House for the daily press briefing. It wasn't easily gotten, but it was gotten nonetheless. (Garrett's coverage here: day one, day two, day three, day four, and day five.)
Garrett's impressions:
All-in-all it was a very surreal day--anti-climatic almost even. Something similar happened to bloggers attending the conventions last year: There was a big to-do beforehand and then their writing all seemed sort of pedestrian after all the hype. They were the biggest news they came across.
Indeed we spent almost as much time being interviewed by the regular White House press corps yesterday as we spent interviewing them. In fact, at times we felt it was so meta that Marc Ambinder and the Note had to be guiding our day: We were being interviewed by reporters about what it was like to interview them about them interviewing the White House.
Garrett also had a conversation with Scott McClellan afterwards, the most interesting takeaway of which was this: He doesn't read blogs.
More coverage here, and a gratuitous screengrab of Garrett on MSNBC (via Trey Jackson).
· White House approves pass for blogger [NY Times]
· Blogger in the White House [WaPo]
· Bloggers blag way into White House [Times of London]
· Gannon comments on first blogger at WH briefing [E&P]
· A blogging first at the White House [MSNBC]
· OnPoint: West Wing for a day [NPR]
· White House admits 1st blogger to briefing [AP]
· White House admits blogger to press room [UPI]
· Blogger wins White House pass—for a day [AFP]
And my personal favorite, from ABC's The Note (where Garrett interned):
"Garrett Graff a. k. a. "Stretch Junior" joins the White House press corps for a day. We knew him when& like when we assigned him to quickly digest a steamy Lynne Cheney novel moments before Mrs. Cheney's husband was announced as the vice presidential pick of Gov. Bush. Mr. Graff didn't complain"
Congratulations, Garrett!
I kept meaning to do something on this earlier, but kept forgetting. Leave it to Howard Kurtz to remind me. From Kurtz's column:
The Fishbowl DC guy, emulating Jeff Gannon, finally got a day pass into the White House and filed his first reports. Sounds like he could barely stay awake.
"We'd been warned by a regular White House correspondent over the weekend that the 'zoo' of the briefing would likely leave us knowing less and being more confused than when went in. Having sat through it now, we have to agree."
But InstaPundit strikes a skeptical note:
"Garrett Graff is vice president of communications at EchoDitto, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based technology consulting firm. A Vermont native, he served formerly as deputy national press secretary on Howard Dean's presidential campaign and, beginning in 1997, was then-Governor Dean's first webmaster.
"A partisan PR guy disguised as a 'real journalist!' He's even a 'dittohead!' Somebody tell Kos. I'm sure he'll be right on it. . . . "
Garrett (a) does not work for Howard Dean or any partisan affliated company now; (b) has been totally up front about the fact that he's Dean's former assistant press secretary, even to the point of mentioning it as one reason why it's bizarre that he couldn't get White House security clearance immediately having gotten it before.
Comparing Garrett to Jeff Gannon is intellectually dishonest. (I actually assumed Glenn was being ironic when he wrote that, but maybe I read it incorrectly.) Gannon went in as part of a partisan organization. Mediabistro is not partisan, and Garrett is not acting as a partisan reporter as part of mb. Nor is Echoditto a partisan organization. (It's a for-profit online community consulting company.) The most Kurtz (or anyone) can complain about is that Garrett has a documented political opinion. And any journalist who voted in the last election (Mr. Kurtz?) can't have a problem with that.
The difference between Kurtz and Garrett is that Garrett doesn't have the luxury of denying that he has an opinion and implying that he or she has a superior claim on "objectivity" as a result.
· My most recent mb column: Estrich vs. Kinsley, Part 783.
· I'll be reading at the WSYIWYG show with Radosh and some other people on April 19th. The usual place, the usual time.
· On April 20th, I'll be moderating a mediabistro panel on reporting via blogs. Come for the panel; stay for the Lockhart Steele. (Other panelists TBA.)
· I have an non-fiction piece called "Andrew Krucoff and the Amazing Paper Weblog" in this book. Five better reasons to buy it: pieces by Tracy Chevalier, Nell Freudenberger, Meghan Daum, Neal Pollack, and Six Apart's Anil Dash.
· PR Week did a profile of me that got a few minor things wrong, but I kind of liked.
I'll be in DC tomorrow night launching (or launch partying, rather) FishbowlDC and TVNewser. I haven't actually been to DC in a couple of years, unless you count the various airports, and the last time I was there I was conducting due diligence on a technology startup that was selling a sort of ISP-in-a-box product to various underdeveloped countries. The company was losing money, losing employees, etc., but they had big shiny offices with a popcorn machine in the lobby and a seemingly endless supply of nerf toys. And this was post-crash. (It was the year of immaturity masquerading as childlike whimsy. To this day, foosball tables in corporate environments fill me with an unmistakeable sense of impending doom.)
So it was all I could do to keep from banging my head against the wall when the CEO excitedly told me that the company was going to rescue itself by selling the product to a handful of companies in Nigeria. The same Nigeria where the electrical blackout rate is somewhere in the mid-double digits? Where the literacy rates eliminate approximately 30% of the population from using the Internet in the first place? Where the monthly per-monthly usage fees for your product equal 82% of the country's annual average per capita income? Where getting cash in and out of the country is almost impossible? Yes! That Nigeria!
Every time I get email from the only living son of the late Charles Taylor confidentially offering me 26,000,000 USD if I would be so good as to provide him with my bank account number and routing directions, I can't help but wonder if somewhere one of those dead dictator's sons is snickering over the huge wodges of cash he just got wired from an ex-technology entrepreneur in D.C. But then again, someone's obviously been building Internet infrastructure there or I wouldn't be getting so many of those confidential offers.
[If stumbling across this wasn't surreal enough...]
John Hiler of Microcontent News is blogging again after a 2(+) year hiatus. (It's about time!)