I presented two papers at the APSA conference last weekend.  The first (at the Political Communication Preconference) was a report on the “Membership Communications Project,”  which is a dataset of 2,162 advocacy group emails, compiled over a 6 month time period.  The second was a paper called “Beyond Citizen Journalism” which uses the Weigelgate controversy from June 2010 to get into the fluid definitional boundaries between bloggers and journalists, as well as delving into the role played by backchannel discussion channels like JournoList.

The MCP dataset is open data, and it resides in a googledoc spreadsheet.  If you’re interested in using the data, contact me directly and I’ll add you to the user base.