While RedState is a "must-read for those interested in the national political scene from the center-right point of view," Scott Graves says his blog, Red County, fills another niche. Its content is all "original and local," said Graves, 38, president of Partisan Media Group, which also runs Red County magazine, a two-year-old publication that targets influential politicos.

Bloggers Plan To Blanket GOP Convention
Sunday, Aug. 31, 2008
by Winter Casey

Move over, Bill Kristol. The 2008 Republican National Convention will be a showcase for a new crop of young political analysts who made their reputations not on ink and paper but in the blogosphere. GOP insiders will be toggling for their news and gossip on the Internet, checking in frequently with blogs like Erick Erickson's RedState and Ed Morrissey's Hot Air.

This year, the two major political parties issued credentials for far more political bloggers not affiliated with traditional media outlets than they did in 2004. Four years ago, Republicans credentialed about a dozen bloggers, and Democrats registered a little over 30. In 2008, Republicans expect to host as many as 200 bloggers in Minneapolis-St. Paul; the Democrats credentialed 120 bloggers at their convention in Denver last week. The GOP is treating bloggers the same as traditional journalists, even providing them with a large office space equipped with Internet and telephone access.

RedState.com, which was started in July 2004, is sending 11 credentialed bloggers to the convention. Erickson, 33, the full-time editor of the blog, says the team plans to cover every aspect of the convention, including protesters, speeches, delegates, and the traditional media. His reporters will be equipped with Flip video cameras--small, digital camcorders with virtually no buttons. RedState gets about 50,000 unique visitors a day, and is among the most widely read right-of-center blogs. Anyone can register with the website and post comments and views.

"We have a greater sense of what the base is thinking and their position on various issues than what you might get from someone who is living inside the Beltway," said Erickson, a former lawyer who runs the blog out of Macon, Georgia. He also has worked as a political consultant for several local, state, and national candidates, and cut his teeth as a political blogger for the cable news network MSNBC during the 2004 political season.

While RedState is a "must-read for those interested in the national political scene from the center-right point of view," Scott Graves says his blog, Red County, fills another niche. Its content is all "original and local," said Graves, 38, president of Partisan Media Group, which also runs Red County magazine, a two-year-old publication that targets influential politicos.

Ed Morrissey, 45, will be the lead commentator at the convention for Hot Air, a political blog owned by Michelle Malkin, the syndicated columnist, television commentator, and conservative blogger. A full-time, paid staffer, Morrissey says he normally gets at least 600,000 page views a day. During the convention, he plans to record his observations with the help of video and will focus on providing "a flavor of what is going on."

Morrissey has one of the more unconventional resumes for political blogging. Prior to Hot Air, he spent 18 years as a call-center manager and also managed a burglar- and fire-alarm business. In 2007, he went to work for BlogTalkRadio, and the rest is blogging history.

An alumnus of RedState, Joshua Trevino, 33, will be a convention scribe for his own blog, JoshuaTrevino.com. He blogs on an unpaid, part-time basis and has a targeted readership among policy wonks and GOP activists. He says he gets about 150 unique visitors a day, and plans to focus on the "flavor and intent" of the activist crowd in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Trevino is based in Sacramento, Calif., where he runs a political consulting firm, Trevino Strategies and Media. He previously was a vice president for public policy at the Pacific Research Institute and a onetime communications coordinator for the secretary of Health and Human Services.