Bloggers influence Southern Baptist election

dKo draws my attention to A Shift Among the Evangelicals by E. J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post (Friday, June 16, 2006; Page A25):

Sometimes very important elections receive very little attention. When the Southern Baptist Convention elected the Rev. Frank Page as the group’s president… One other force was at work in this year’s Baptist voting: the rise of the blogosphere. Over the past several years, an active network of Baptist bloggers has opened up discussion in the convention and given reformers and moderates avenues around what Parham called “the Baptist establishment papers” and other means of communication controlled by the convention’s leadership. Thus may some of our oldest and most traditional institutions be transformed by new technologies.