Alaska's 2008 Election Bloggers to be Discussed in Upcoming Book

Eric Boehlert, one of the founders of Media Matters for America, recently finished a book about important aspects of the rapidly changing American political scene.

The book, titled Bloggers on the Bus - How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, will be released May 19th. Chapter Thirteen, about how Alaska's bloggers played a role in getting detailed information about Sarah Palin, and our kinky, sometimes difficult political customs out to an eager Outside press in late summer and early autumn of 2008, is called Saradise Lost.

I spoke with publisher Simon & Schuster's publicist for the book, Christine Donnelly, this morning. She told me that the chapter on Alaska bloggers will bring up the role local blogs like Alaska Real, Andrew Halcro, Celtic Diva's Blue Oasis, Just a Girl from Homer, Kodiak Konfidential, The Mudflats, Own the Sidewalk, Progressive Alaska, The Immoral Minority and What Do I Know? played in both the McCain/Palin and Begich-Stevens campaigns.

I spent a fair amount of time on the phone and emailing Boehlert last year, as he began work on this.

Here's a description of the entire book from the publisher:

Ever since radio entered the American private home, technology has shaped political campaign strategy. Radio brought candidates more intimately and vividly into citizens' lives than newspapers could. The televised presidential debate of 1960 -- in which a strapping John F. Kennedy embarrassed a clammy Richard M. Nixon -- was technology's next coup. In the last decade, though, it is the internet that has radically changed the way that candidates campaign: social networking sites, YouTube, and blogs have become important vehicles for political activism. And the grand editorial and political power that this group -- the "netroots," as bloggers call it -- wields has never been more apparent than in the groundbreaking 2008 presidential election.

Bloggers on the Bus traces the online events that rocked the campaign trail and reveals the untold stories of the internet activists who made them all possible. In the tradition of Timothy Crouse's classic, The Boys on the Bus, Bloggers on the Bus investigates the cutting edge of liberal politics to reveal the stories and scandals at its very heart. The cast includes everyone from former professional rock saxophonist John Amato who, years before YouTube, changed blogging forever by unleashing his TiVo and figuring out how to post TV clips online, to sixty-something Oakland housewife Mayhill Fowler, who joined the Huffington Post as a volunteer journalist and went on to break two of the biggest stories of the Democratic primary.

Boehlert tells the story of acerbic West Coast blogger Digby, whose gender shocked the male-dominated blogosphere, as well as that of graphic tech Philip de Vellis, who culture-jacked an iconic Apple ad in order to create the infamous "Vote Different" video that influenced the Democratic primary. These are just a few of the bloggers pioneering the major shift in today's media who are profiled in Bloggers on the Bus. All of their efforts have set off an industry-wide debate about journalism and privacy and have permanently altered the character of campaign strategy.

Using the 2008 presidential race as a dramatic backdrop, Boehlert details the myriad ways these bloggers influenced both the candidates and their campaigns, while also chronicling the bitter blogger civil war that erupted during the contentious Democratic primary season. Offering unprecedented portraits of these new power brokers, Bloggers on the Bus goes behind the scenes to chronicle a media and political rebellion in the making.

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image - Eric Boehlert