NDN in the News: Peter Leyden in the NYT Sunday Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle

New Politics Institute Director Peter Leyden was featured in two major articles in the last few days.  The first was a San Francisco Chronicle preview of the role of bloggers at the 2007 California Democratic Party Convetion and the second, Matt Bai's piece in the NYT Sunday Magazine entitled "The Post-Money Era."  Excerpts from the articles and links are below.

Bloggers Descend On Dems' Gathering

(04-28) 04:00 PDT San Diego -- When Democrats gathered at their candidate-rich California state convention five years ago, a lone blogger from Berkeley was the first, and only, one of his kind to apply for media credentials to cover the events.

Today, an army has arrived in the wake of Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of the Daily Kos -- one of the nation's most highly trafficked Web logs, which boasts about 600,000 daily readers.

This year, a record 50 Internet-publication bloggers will join the estimated 400 credentialed "mainstream" media in the press room to track the goings-on of seven Democratic presidential candidates and 2,100 California party delegates this weekend.

And those numbers don't count the estimated dozens of mainstream media journalists who will be blogging for major newspapers or the unknown numbers of delegates who will be producing their own running commentary of the convention.

"What this is doing is blowing apart the old calculus for who gets to come to the party and who doesn't," says Peter Leyden, director of the San Francisco-based New Politics Institute, a think tank that tracks the intersection of the Internet and politics.

With the 2008 presidential election just 556 days away, political parties and candidates understand that bloggers have become a critical part of the commentary on political developments "on a scale that is absolutely astounding," he said.

"Many of them have passionate followers, people who are crazy about politics," Leyden said. "And if you legitimize them, and bring them into inner circles ... they will get a huge new segment of folks energized that aren't necessarily reading newspapers and aren't involved in politics..."

Read the entire article here... 

The Post-Money Era

By Matt Bai 

“...The need for money is probably going to reach some diminishing return, and it’s probably going to be a pretty low ceiling, compared to past campaigns,” predicts Peter Leyden, president of the left-leaning New Politics Institute. In other words, the emerging high-tech marketplace may yet bring us closer to what decades of federal campaign regulations have failed to achieve: a day when candidates can afford to spend less time obsessing over the constant need for cash and more time concerned with the currency of their ideas.

Read the entire article here...