“Journalists Will Not Be Center Stage”: As Political Conventions Go Virtual, the Party’s Over for the Press

In ordinary times, to crib from a veteran political journalist I was chatting with this week, a presidential-nominating convention is “part high school reunion, part country fair, and part fashion show, interrupted occasionally by genuine moments of news and history. It features three things most beloved by journalists: schmoozing, free booze, and proximity to what feels like real action.”. “No one’s there.

Weigel, who is a regular at political extravaganzas covered by the press, is one of just two journalists on the ground in Milwaukee for the, which would typically send a few dozen to the Democratic National Convention—or the Republican one for that matter—as well as setting up its own venue to host live interviews and mixers and photo ops and the like.

“It’s totally unrecognizable from what it usually is,” Weigel told me. “There’s just not stuff that reporters can go to. There’s not even media badges to pick up.” If COVID-19 didn’t exist, Milwaukee would be a media circus right now, crawling with hundreds of journalists and journalist-adjacent types as they bounced around from this hotel to that drinks thing to the convention floor and back again, channeling all of the pomp and FOMO into scene-y dispatches and caffeinated cable-news segments. Instead, the official 2020 convention site is a ghost town.

As with so many IRL functions that we’ve realized can actually run smoothly in a remote situation—producing newscasts, putting together magazines and newspapers, etc.—it seems to be working, even if it’s not ideal. There’s something to be said for the perch of a podium and the raw energy of cheering crowds, but the lack of those things didn’t stop

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