Blog P.I.

I don’t write about clients often. When I do it’s really something, and this is really something: New Media Strategies will be working through the conventions with C-SPAN, perhaps my favorite Beltway news organization, to run their Convention Hub. The website was designed by NMS partner JESS3, will be maintained by the multi-partisan Public Affairs practice, with editorial oversight and video from the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. I wish I could show it to you. I can’t just yet, but as I said, it’s going to be really something.

What I can offer are details about the Convention Hub microsites. There will be two, one for each convention, with video and blog coverage around the clock:

• C-SPAN will provide exclusive video from the conventions, and for the first time, this C-SPAN video is searchable, clippable and embeddable. As someone who has tried (unsuccessfully) to jerry-rig an embeddable C-SPAN video in the past, this is a huge leap forward.


• NMS will feed the latest convention reporting and blogging to the Convention Hub pretty much non-stop. Or as our official language puts it, “extensive real-time blogosphere coverage using NMS’s proprietary combination of software and trained human analysts.”


• More about that software another time; all I can say is that it answers the questions I’ve asked about such analysis tools.


• The Hub will also include Twitter feeds of users using the hashtags #RNC08 and #DNC08 (and surely other tags, as their usage rises).


• The site goes live at c-span.org/politics later this month. The Democratic Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/DNC08 and the Republican Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/RNC08.


• NMS will have a presence at each convention to help to facilitate coverage and promote the Convention Hub. It certainly doesn’t hurt that we have bloggers credentialed to both (see you in St. Paul).


• There is more, but I’m not exactly sure what I didn’t see in the press release that’s public, so I’d better hold off for now. At the moment, this is the only public hint on c-span.org:

Meanwhile, the C-SPAN Convention Hub is already drawing praise from one of C-SPAN’s (few) notable critics. The Sunlight Foundation has differed with C-SPAN before over distribution of copyrighted C-SPAN video, so they are enthusiastic about the open nature of the Convention Hubs:

The convention announcement marks a new moment for C-SPAN as a modern Internet information provider. Once a small cable channel with a dream; now with embeddable web video, Twitter hashtags, and aggregated blog posts.

As a longtime C-SPAN junkie, I couldn’t be more proud to play a small part in this project. How dependent am I on the C-SPAN network?

• I wake up to Washington Journal every weekday morning (my Twitter account will bear this out).


• Before I found podcasts, I’d listen to streaming Realplayer segments from the program (I still listen to the podcast of Brian Lamb’s Sunday night Q&A).


• Back in college I would sometimes wake up early (4 a.m.) to catch particular episodes live, such as the first of the Hitchens-Sullivan conversations with Lamb, shortly after 9/11.


• If it’s the weekend and my television is not on baseball or football, it’s on BookTV.


• The tagline of my personal blog, The Washington Canard, is: “Where C-SPAN is the local TV news.”

The good news is that it’s a supportable addiction.

And by way of conclusion, a confession: I want this searchable video for my own reasons. On Election night 2004, The Hotline worked all through the night covering the coverage, as the election tipped from Kerry winning the exit polls to Bush winning the popular vote. If you’ve seen my Facebook photo, this is where that crazy image comes from.

As usual, C-SPAN cameras were in the office for Chuck Todd and Vaughn Ververs to offer recaps, also deep into the morning hours. Sometime around 3 o’clock in the morning, I informed friends watching the coverage from back on the West Coast to look carefully: As the cameras rolled, I picked up a plastic trash bin and… well, I danced through the background.

The waltz, I think.

I entered left with vulcanized dance partner, twirling across one shoulder, behind the talking head, past the other shoulder, exiting right. To this date, it’s still my best television appearance. And I look forward to the day, much sooner now, that I can embed this on Blog P.I.