After the Fall - Government Activity

When the dust from the election clears, will the party be over for political-content sites?

The last time Carl Bernstein officiated at a major upheaval in the practice of journalism, his news was hard, his hair was black and his stories ran on paper.

But here is the legendary Watergate scribe, his hair now a blank-screen white and his days spent supervising a staff who assemble "packages" - filled mostly with other people's information - for the political Web site Voter.com. "What's evolving is a whole new kind of political journalism," says Bernstein, executive editor (and executive VP) of the Washington-based site. "I feel like I did when I was 16 and went to work for the Washington Star and found this whole new amazing world."

It will need to be an amazingly nimble world. Voter and other high-profile sites specializing in political news-you-can-use - Politics.com, Grassroots.com and SpeakOut.com - face a troubling morning-after come Nov. 8. For months, the sites have subsisted on extensive digests of national and global political news and rich data about candidates' finances and platforms. But without the sizzle of a presidential campaign, will users keep coming?

"Politics is not just about elections," Bernstein says, a thought echoed by his competitors. They all have unique post-election plans that sound a lot like the other guy's unique plans. "Everybody's morphing around Ending a niche," says Grassroots VP Kyle McSlarrow.

They are betting on what might be dubbed Murphy's law of politics. "Congress is not going away. Airlines are still going to be late. Streets will still be torn up," says Rich Galen, a VP at SpeakOut. "There are things for people still to be interested in after the election."

Local politics, for one. By 2001, Voter.com expects to be a source of candidate position papers, bios and voting records for most of the half-million candidates running for city council, school board and other offices. Politics.com will feature issues that appeal to the heartland.

The all-politics sites also offer services beyond free content. Voter.com builds Web sites for candidates and produces online newsletters for interest groups. SpeakOut and Grassroots license their political-organizing software.

Still, the bread and butter of these sites remains content aimed at the politically obsessed - and there might not be enough users to go around. "I love political junkies. That's who I write for," says Robert W. Merry, publisher of the Congressional Quarterly. "But I have never assumed there were enough political junkies to make a business national, even in the exciting world of dot-com."

Patrick A. McGuire (pat.mcguire@home.com) is a writer in Abingdon, Md.

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