• National Journal, Thursday, August 30, 2012 3:18 PM

The Republican convention may be racking up lower TV ratings than the summer Olympics, but as another event on the national stage, it's also bringing more lessons about how media coverage has changed. Take the speedy firing of Yahoo News Washington bureau chief David Chalian for making what he thought was an off-camera comment about the Romneys. "With new media moving into legacy media realms, and so-called old media adopting the tools of the insurgency, the possibility for pratfalls multiply," writes David Carr. "Mr. Chalian said something really dumb and tasteless that suggested significant personal bias, so it is no surprise he ended up in trouble. But you get the feeling that the bold new world we operate in played a role in his demise. The answer to 'Is this thing on?' is always yes."

"Thse tempest served to illustrate changes in the character of campaign coverage in the 2012 election," writes John Aloysius Farrell. "Voters are forming impressions from droves of disparate sources of information—like Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook—which they process quite differently than before, when television and the legacy news media largely dictated the tenor of the moment."

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