In 2008, the U.S. cities hosting the Democratic and Republican conventions are being overrun with about 15,000 journalists.

Major American networks are sending their finest correspondents, bloggers will be out in force, and smaller outlets are finding hotel vacancies a distant memory and wireless-equipped workstations scarce.

Despite what the media frenzy might suggest, conventions don’t tend to be newsworthy. We already know Barack Obama and John McCain will be their parties’ nominees; we’ll know their running mates before the conventions convene; and we know the party platforms will be written broadly and probably blandly. The news media traditionally complain about conventions, using terms like “empty ritual,” “staged” and “choreographed.”

In 2004, The Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson theorized each city actually is hosting two separate conventions – one for the delegates and political activists, and another for the journalists. As the political side has grown “wan and meaningless,” the media presence has become “larger, more elaborate, and more robust.” Journalists are expanding coverage for their own purposes, Ferguson argues, stating, “The parasite has consumed the host.”

In 2008, Slate.com’s Jack Shafer urged the news media either to limit its coverage to the bare-bones feed from the government/public affairs channel C-SPAN, or else hire effervescent sportscasters who “know how to make a game with a foregone conclusion seem entertaining.”

To which many journalists respond, “Wait – this year it’s different!” Ted Koppel, the former ABC anchor who walked out of the 1996 Republican convention in bored frustration, will be an analyst for BBC America. He told Courant.com blogger Roger Catlin, “This has been one of the most remarkable political years we’ve ever seen.”

CBS’s Jeff Greenfield says much of his coverage will focus on the supporters of runner-up candidates. “In both conventions, I would guess roughly half the delegates wanted somebody else,” he said.

Based on polling data from four years ago, Americans enjoy the media fixation on national conventions. The Vanishing Voter Project at Harvard University reported 63 percent of respondents said conventions are important because they provide an opportunity to get to know the candidates better.

For an inside look at what’s going on at the convention, check out our elections blog, Campaign Trail Talk.

As Georgia’s geographic boundaries were being crossed by Russian forces, many of Georgia’s official Web sites were attacked. The Georgian National Bank and President Mikhail Saakashvili’s sites were disabled, and the foreign ministry’s homepage was defaced with photos of the president next to Adolph Hitler.

When Georgia accused Russian bloggers of being behind the attacks, Estonia, which suffered its own cyberattacks during a 2007 dispute with Russia, offered some of its expertise to help out. In the meantime, some Russian media outlets and separatist Web sites in South Ossetia also reported cyberattacks.

After hearing rumors that hackers were receiving their orders from the Russian government, Slate.com writer Evgeny Morozov enlisted himself as a Russian “cybersoldier” in a research project to “test how much damage someone like me, who is quite aloof from the Kremlin physically and politically, could inflict upon Georgia’s Web infrastructure.”

It was pretty easy. After only two or three minutes, Morozov found a way to get his Internet browser to overload a list of Georgian Web sites by automatically sending them thousands of queries. Hacking is a game that almost anyone with a political axe to grind can play.

Bobbie Johnson of The Guardian, a British newspaper, is troubled by the chaos of “hacktivism,” as he describes the grassroots movement. When cyberwarfare shuts down a Web page, it affects governments and news media outlets as well as individual users. And, as shown by the Morozov example, much of the Internet is pretty vulnerable.

That’s Johnson’s critical point. Today the justification for cyberattacks is a nationalist war. Once it’s over, hackers’ next targets could be whatever they felt like going after when they got out of bed that particular morning.

So, instead of imagining hackers as patriotic fighters, Johnson advises seeing them as “a mob of untraceable louts who cause havoc for no real reason other than they can. Think of them as unruly, unhinged and unrepentant - just like the worst trolls you’ve encountered.”

For more about developments in Georgia, see Georgia in Crisis.

Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who passed away August 3, revealed the abuses of Soviet Gulag prison camps in the 1970s. For many, his death brought back memories of secretly copying clandestine writings and passing them hand to hand under the noses of the Soviet authorities.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, whose 2003 book Gulag: A History won a Pulitzer Prize, recalled how the first copies of Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 The Gulag Archipelago his Russian audience saw were unbound and hand-typed — “blurry, mimeographed text” with “dog-eared paper.”

“Usually, readers were given only 24 hours to finish the lengthy manuscript … before it had to be passed on to the next person. That meant spending an entire day and night,” she wrote. Readers also were encouraged to type or write another copy if they could.

Clandestine books and writings by Russian authors were known as “samizdat,” meaning “self-published,” as opposed to “tamizdat” which was forbidden literature smuggled in from overseas. Along with Solzhenitsyn, some of today’s Russian classics such as Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov began their public life as samizdat.

Famous scientist and political dissident Alexander Bolonkin tried to publish samizdat on a large scale in the 1970s before his arrest, imprisonment and eventual exile to the United States. Knowing the KGB monitored printing houses, he first experimented with photo printing, and then discovered a crude form of mimeography.

“The text was typed on the fibrous paper sodden with paraffin with the help of typewriter. The obtained matrix was put on the bland print and was pressed by the roller with paint. There appeared a copy below. All the process took few seconds. The components were sold at stores. Anybody could make or buy a photoroller. Indeed the quality of the imprints was quite low,” he wrote in his memoirs.

After the collapse of Soviet Union in the late 1980s, once-forbidden literature, much of which had been smuggled abroad, became widely available. But, thanks to samizdat, writers like Solzhenitsyn did not have to wait for a new era but instead had the chance to hasten its arrival.

Like other reporters, White House correspondents are being drawn into blogging and videography. For some of the more traditional journalists, the better verb might be “dragged.”

The National Journal’s Alexis Simendinger, herself a regular in the Brady Press Briefing Room, describes her workplace as “one of the last protected habitats for inverted-pyramid mainstream journalism” which is now “tiptoeing” in the direction of blogs and “writing that entertains and mixes analysis with news.”

And it’s not just written products. Uncharacteristically armed with a video camera, Ken Herman from Cox Newspapers recently gave his readers the insider’s view on what it’s like to be a White House pool reporter on Air Force One. (It’s boring.)

The White House press corps includes some of America’s most seasoned journalists, many of whom doubt the wisdom of ditching newspaper articles in favor of “bite-sized appetizers of information” that “are supposed to be more Cheez Whiz than escargot” as Simendinger describes.

The Houston Chronicle’s Julie Mason, one of the first to make the transition to blogging, albeit reluctantly, remembers being relentlessly mocked by her colleagues.

“It was superficial and trivial … we were trend monkeys, and it was the dumbing-down of everything we hold dear. I had worries about the same things,” she said. Over time, the freedom of writing informally and the direct interactions with her readers gave her a more favorable view of the blogosphere.

The remaining holdouts eventually might have to surrender. Blogs are attracting new visitors to newspaper Web sites and, as the Washington Times’ Stephen Dinan once asked, “Who nowadays is honestly reading a newspaper article from beginning to end?” The Chicago Tribune’s Mark Silva, as quoted in Simendinger’s article, might be right about the 21st-century news business. “The news cycle is just not sufficient anymore. You can’t put something out in the morning paper and expect it to be competitive.”

What do you think? Are blogs the death knell for real journalism or is there room for peaceful coexistence?

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August 8, 2008, marks 20 years since Burmese students began a pro-democracy uprising against the military regime led by General U Ne Win. The “8888 uprising” ultimately was crushed and military rule re-imposed at the cost of about 3,000 civilian lives.

But the yearning for a free press made the summer of 1988 one of the country’s richest in journalistic and literary activity.

Between August 25 and 27, the staffs of Burma’s official newspapers joined in calls for the government’s resignation, formation of an interim government and multiparty elections. State journalists also demanded the right to report accurately on the demonstrations.

For three days, no newspapers appeared; on the fourth day, readers saw photos of peaceful marches and articles that recounted their demands.

Even more remarkable were the nearly 100 unofficial publications that sprang up between August 27 and September 21. Along with reports and photos of the demonstrations, they carried long interviews with opposition leaders, including Aung San Suu Kyi and articles from the Western press on how to conduct democratic elections. They also provided a platform for personal statements and editorials by leading journalists who had been blacklisted or driven into silence.

In her 1993 report Inked Over, Ripped Out, Professor Anna Allott described the period as “the Burmese version of glasnost,” and wrote “Journalistic activity continued to increase in intensity and effectiveness, almost as if the free, unofficial publications were spurring the official press to give more accurate information.”

The military forcefully re-imposed its rule with a September 16 massacre of civilians and a September 18 coup. The official newspapers disappeared September 19 and 20, and resurfaced in their old forms – with little real news or objective comment. The unofficial newspapers all but disappeared and the state censorship bureau became even more restrictive than it had been before 1988.

Want to find out more? Read Professor Allot’s report and my recent article about how Burmese writers have been coping with the state censors.

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