Sunday, August 31, 2008

St. Paul Scoop: Tech Round-Up

Several stories of interest in Convention Daily:

Back-To-Back Conventions Have Crews Wired

As exhausted Democrats rest up from last week's festivities and Republicans prepare to throw their quadrennial grand old party, weary media are wrestling with the hassles, expense, and physical challenges of relocating operations from Denver to the Twin Cities with no break between the two parties' conventions.

Many information-technology staffers are on week two of a three-week convention road trip because they had to be in Denver long before the reporters, editors, and photographers to install the computer networks, fiber-optic cables, phone lines, and other technology the media depend on to do their job.

Read the full story here.

Bloggers Plan To Blanket GOP Convention

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.

Read the full story here.

GOP Convention Braces for Online Threat

The danger of cyber attack doesn't worry convention planners the way that protests and more-concrete threats do. But the result of an online assault could be a lot more spectacular than just some lost e-mail.

When Jason Bevis took over network-security operations for the 2004 Republican convention in New York, he found a system so permeable that hackers could have gained access to the host committee's internal network. From there, intruders could have tampered not only with communications from delegates and staff, but also with the text of each night's speeches -- even the words coming up on the teleprompter.

Read the full story here.