Lam was the second paid staffer on Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, where she tended—as much as one could—the candidate’s vigorous online presence.
When the editors post a story that they think could grab play, they’ll forward it to Lam, who will package it and pass it on to a custom list of journalists and bloggers in Politicker’s operational states, or to a national lists with names like “Anti-war bloggers” or “Catholic bloggers.”
She introduced herself, and the site, to many bloggers working out of Denver’s Big Tent, taking up to half an hour to learn their interests and explain Politicker.
“I wanted them to feel like I cared,” she said. On Wednesday, she spent some time on “Radio Row,” where talk show hosts work during the convention, collecting business cards and flacking Pindell as a guest.
Lam says about half of her emails net the site at least one inbound link. Monday’s news that Karl Rove called Joe Biden a “’big, blowhard doofus” during his talk at the Maine RNC delegation’s breakfast meeting brought in around 60,000 hits, which Smith says an extraordinary amount of traffic for PolitickerME. (PolitickerNJ, which was called PoliticsNJ before Kushner purchased and rebranded it, is the most-trafficked site in the group, according to Smith, with 1.25 million hits in the last month.)
The crew had a soft quota of ten stories each, per day, at the conventions, and most had little trouble meeting it because of their suddenly easy access to their states’ politicos.
“It’s basically everyone I’m ever trying to call, except that they’re all in one room, and everyone has something to tell me,” said Reiter.
“The cool thing about our site is that to build our name, we try to really break stories,” said Jeremy Jacobs, the twenty-five-year-old Massachusetts reporter. “That and obsessive local coverage that newspapers don’t really do anymore.”
“We don’t cover the governor’s energy plan. We cover how it will play politically across the state. It’s not substantive, in that way,” said Jacobs.
“It’s inside baseball,” chimed in Reitman. “But that’s how policy is made. It’s congressmen going into rooms and personal relationships, right? I mean, I could be wrong.”
“No, you’re right.”
“Well, I’m new to this.”
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For every mantra about the death of traditional media, there's always somebody with a good idea (like Politicker) that seems to make alternative media better. There's so much news to cover in the world that the lazy questions reporters ask (i.e, "How do you feel after losing the game?", "Your opponent says") aren't cutting it any more.
Posted by circusboy on Sun 7 Sep 2008 at 09:43 AM