Hanging Out With The Press

  There's roughly 15,000 journalists in Denver right now, covering the Democratic National Convention.

  And with that many - from bloggers to print reporters to TV anchors to talking heads to whatever - there's actually less breaking news.

  Quote: “I don’t like events where there are a gazillion reporters,” (Adam Nagourney of the New York Times) said. “If you come here and David Axelrod came walking down the aisle over there, there’d be 500 people around him, and you’d be getting the most boilerplate quotes. So what’s the point?”

What is the point?

“I feel like this is the dumb state of reporting in a presidential campaign,” said Michael Scherer, a writer for Time magazine. “Everyone is spending time and millions of dollars to break something six hours before it’s announced.”

  But feel free to take a look at what all those reporters are up to.

  And the Columbia Journalism Review offers up its take as well.

  Quote: Only a small number of reporters actually have a reason to be here. The rest are conventioneering—seeing old friends, eating Democratic-themed menu items (“Barack Obama’s Turkey Chili”) in pandering local restaurants, brandishing their press passes at all comers, looking for free things, and spending about 14 percent of their time trying to rustle up enough stories to justify their presence to their editors. These reporters are the ones mostly writing about themselves, or their friends, or their experiences exploring Denver with their friends