By Eric Boehlert, Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America

Since its debut in May 2004, the growth of Media Matters for America has run parallel with the success of the liberal blogosphere and the larger online netroots movement, which has become the New Media voice for progressives nationwide. Together, Media Matters and the blogosphere have helped change the conversation about the press and politics in America.

It's for that reason that I'm pleased to tell you about a new book by Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press. In his new effort, Boehlert goes inside the liberal blogosphere and provides the most definitive and extensive look at the netroots movement to date. Using the historic 2008 White House campaign as a backdrop, Boehlert also details how bloggers helped set the agenda -- a role once considered to be the exclusive province of the establishment Beltway press corps.

Inspired by Timothy Crouse's landmark 1973 book, The Boys on the Bus, which unveiled modern campaign journalism at the time, Boehlert pulls back the online curtain and helps readers better understand the revolution that's taken place, as well as the unlikely participants who are leading it: students, housewives, attorneys, professors, musicians.

Bloggers on the Bus exposes the traditional press' outdated stereotypes about bloggers and leaves them by the roadside in order to paint a more complete portrait of this increasingly influential community.

As a proud cornerstone of the netroots movement, Media Matters is proof of what's possible when progressives strive to reinvent our national dialogue. Boehlert is one of the leading progressive voices today, and his Bloggers on the Bus arrives as an important and entertaining account of the rise of bloggers and the history they continue to make.