Every four years seems to usher in new ways for the media to cover the presidential nominating conventions and, in response, new ways that party operatives seek to control their message.

The dealmaking in smoky back rooms ended decades ago, essentially when the first television coverage of the conventions started in 1948. Soon, the major political parties were scrambling to program the gatherings to better captivate viewers. Then came live coverage, followed by wall-to-wall cable coverage. And then, a decade ago, the Internet. I remember being in the first wave of convention reporters filing for the Web while covering the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego for the San Jose Mercury News.

By 2000, print, TV, cable, radio and Internet companies such as AOL lined “Internet Alleys” in Los Angeles and Philadelphia and fed online convention coverage portals. Four years ago, as TV networks cut back air time for the increasingly predictable conventions, “Blogger Alley” joined the technological streetscape in both Boston and New York, producing more partisan coverage.

So what’s it going to be this time around? I think I can answer that in 140 characters or less: Twitter.

For those out of the technological loop — or without kids or colleagues in the teen-to-twentysomething demographic — Twitter is the hot new social networking phenomenon. It allows users to instantly inform their friends or fans of what they’re doing, seeing or thinking — as long as the communication can be done in no more than 140 keystrokes.

The mainstream media are already using Twitter to cover politics. News organizations, from The Washington Post to ABC News, send “tweets” alerting Twitter subscribers to links to new articles or video online. But perhaps the most interesting tweets are coming from reporters on the campaign trail, providing often witty and sometimes insightful observations. One tweet from Time.com Washington Editor Ana Marie Cox about Barack Obama’s trip abroad: “Obama Berlin speech@1pm. Fun fact: 10,000s of Germans gathering to cheer a charismatic leader is not, typically, considered a good thing! 10:38 AM July 24, 2008.”

John Dickerson, Slate’s chief political correspondent, had this to tweet recently: “New McCain campaign video about how media is in love with Obama reminds me of those Web videos the boys put out about their ex-girlfriends. 12:08 PM July 22, 2008.”

Political writers say it’s a way to provide observations that wouldn’t necessarily work their way into a story. “I’ve carried a notebook in my back pocket since college, and a lot of what went into those notebooks now goes on Twitter — if it’s less than 140 characters,” Dickerson e-mailed from the road. He says he’ll be Twittering, and writing longer pieces for Slate, throughout the campaign season and beyond

So far, Twitter is not having a major impact on political coverage. But “it’s a promising networking tool for reporters,” said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University who tweets and blogs. “It wouldn’t be so much that you would shift your energies to Twitter. It would be part of what you do, both for pushing out word of what you’re doing and what you’re reporting on . . . and for following developments that you can develop into stories.”

Not everyone feels that way. Some deride Twittering as “micro-journalism” that wrongly disregards any subtlety or nuance in the name of brevity. “Some of it is good. You get little snippets that you might not otherwise get. But they don’t rise to the level of news,” said Elizabeth Skewes of the University of Colorado at Boulder, the author of “Message Control: How News is Made on the Presidential Campaign Trail” (2007 Rowman & Littlefield). “On the other hand, my concern is when that stuff becomes news, whether you Twitter it or put it on an IM or whatever, to some degree it still influences the mainstream media. . . . It starts to be what people pay attention to.”

Some Twitterers think all this pondering is a bit silly. “It’s too small and inconsequential to criticize,” Dickerson said. “It steals people’s time, of course, and they could be spending that time reading some serious journalism. But my guess is that I spend about as much time reading the interesting, thoughtful pieces people Twitter about as I do my Twitter feed.”

Will Twitter influence political coverage? “It still seems to be somewhat inside the Beltway,” said Julie Germany, director of George Washington University’s Institute of Politics, Democracy & the Internet. There was buzz a few months back when it appeared that Obama and John McCain were sparring on Twitter — but the authors turned out to be campaign outsider imposters.

Some 15,000 members of the media are expected to be looking for news at the Democratic convention in Denver three weeks from now and the Republican gathering in St. Paul the week after. Assuming Obama and McCain announce their choices for vice president beforehand, many journalists will be scrounging for interesting things to write about. As conventions become less about picking a nominee and adopting a platform as they are about managing the message, 140 characters might be just about right.

Elizabeth Wasserman is a Washington freelance writer. She can be reached at ewasserman@cq.com. For a complete listing of her column, click here.