Robert Fuller is back in Berkeley, bearing pictures from YearlyKos. Here’s a summary of his thoughts on the gathering:

YearlyKos was not exactly a passing of the torch from traditional to Internet journalists-there remains a need for books, newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV-but it was certainly the acknowledgement by the former of the latter as co-equal members of the indispensable Fourth Estate. If a democracy needs a free and vigilant press to hold government accountable, then the traditional media that historically played that role need the new Internet journalists to hold it accountable. The Romans used to ask “Who guards the guardians?” The analogous questions for media are “Who watches the watchers?”, “Who chronicles the chroniclers?”

The emergent Blogosphere provides an answer. A swarm of bloggers can force the media to live up to the standards of integrity taught in journalism schools or depicted in movies like Good Night and Good Luck. At YearlyKos, 1000 bloggers assembled for the first time and a few famous traditional journalists wrote about the phenomenon with a mixture of condescension and respect. It’s hard to imagine democracy making the evolutionary step to a dignitarian society,
without this new breed of watchdogs that has found a home in the Blogosphere.

While at YearlyKos, Fuller hung out with the Link TV crew as they video-blogged the event.

If anyone is interested, you can see clips from YearlyKos here: http://www.linktv.org/yearlykos/

Longer segments with better video controls and chat are posted here: http://www.fora.tv/ - I was told by Robert Fuller that these are going to be free. When I searched, I found this one.

Robert Fuller just called to update me on all the goings-on at YearlyKos. He attended the Political Journalism panel, where representatives of the main stream media incuding Atrios, Matt Bai, Jay Rosen, Christy Hardin Smith, and Paul Waldman engaged with the increasing influence of bloggers in the national conversation. Fuller was particularly impressed with blogger Marcy Wheeler (”emptywheel” on Daily Kos and The Next Hurrah).

Fuller also spoke highly of the New Politics Begins panel, led by New Democratic Network President Simon Rosenberg and New Politics Institute Director Peter Leyden. This panel examined specific social and political factors (such as immigration) that the Democrats would have to take into account in order to win the presidency in 2008.

Fuller also met Dr. Joel Rogers (Professor of Law, Political Science, and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of Center On Wisconsin Strategy) at a panel on Labor and Power.

Robert Fuller is now at YearlyKos with his friends from Link TV. He’s talking with bloggers about the importance of dignity as a human value and how to merge this value into the politics of the netroots.