We Meet Robert & Crew from Amsterdam

It's always interesting how others see us, and how we seem them.  That's why I asked Robert Paques what he and his camera team were up to at the Bloomberg forum.  During the Q&A part, Robert had posed a pretty good question to the panel:  "In a world of Twitter, Facebook, Buzzfeed, Google, how important will week-long political conventions be down the line?  Are they not becoming old-fashioned?"  The given answers were:  (A) "Political conventions are just lame.  Things are not decided there anymore," said Matt Bai, chief political correspondent for the New York Times Magazine.  (B) "They are old-fashioned, and they are just wonderful.  Even though we know everything in advance, they remain eventful," said Al Hunt, the Washington Editor for Bloomberg News who, like me, covered the 1976 political campaign "without a Blackberry" and seemed especially in tune with the times. and (C) "The conventions may not be as important in news terms as they once were, but they remain generators of the day's multiple news cycles," said Ben LaBolt, national press secretary for Obama for America.   Neither the panel, the Amsterdam crew, nor the audience could determine the correct answer at this stage of the political game.  They all did agree, however, that Clint Eastwood would never again address a political convention, and that henceforth anyone attempting to deliver a convention speech that was not cleared in advance would be wrestled to the ground and beaten with a chair.  At least that's what it sounded like they said.  Olivia Ma, the news editor at YouTube, did note that the Eastwood speech continues to get big play ("in the millions") but could not say exactly where all the views were coming from....Oh yes, back to Robert.  He and his team are filming a documentary on America's political conventions.  He told me they have no buyer as of yet and are doing it on speculation.  "It's so unreal for us in Holland to have these kind of things," he told me.  I almost gave him a high five telling him about our life in Austria and the political system there. Viva Europe.  My hunch is that Robert is on the right track by documenting realtime politics.  Their original video, plus the Eastwood feeds, could turn out to be an Academy award winner.  I asked for his card to keep in touch on their progress.