Nancy Scola argues:
The White House is showing a quiet eagerness to engage with online newsies, just not necessarily the very political and advocacy-minded folks of the political blogosphere. The new news ecosystem isn't foreign to them, they just see it -- and its utility -- differently. The Obama White House would much rather, it seems, route around those hard-core political bloggers and engage with the people who have positioned themselves online as community managers, folks who can be said to bring a constituency to the table (beyond the army of commenters and diarists some blogs and bloggers have). Case in point, the White House is right now, with no great fanfare, inviting the Consumerist and the Motley Fool to pull together questions for the White House on Obama's plan for reforming the "rules of the road" that the financial world has to follow, pegged of off a web video starring White House economic advisor Austan Goolsbee.
(Hat tip: Ben Smith)