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Author Archive for William Beutler

RNC08 #1: Don’t Call it a Comeback

Published by William Beutler on August 31, 2008 in #DNC08, #RNC08, 2008 Conventions, C-SPAN, Hotline, John McCain, Journalist Bloggers, Metapost, National Politics, New Media Strategies, RNC, Relaunches, Twitter, Web 2.0, White House '08 and William Beutler. 1 Comment

C-SPAN 2.0 Featuring New Media Strategies
If you are a frequent reader of Blog P.I., you (and thanks to the MyBlogLog widget in the sidebar, I know who some of you are) may have spent a few seconds out of the past week wondering just where I’ve been. Of course, as my last post two weeks ago made clear, I was about to spend the coming fortnight-and-a-half working on C-SPAN.org’s Convention Hubs: first DNC08 and now increasingly RNC08.

For 168+ hours now I’ve been working literally around the clock — to be more accurate, one revolution of the hour hand each solar day — finding and spotlighting blog posts from national and state-level media and political blogs, and running a Blogads campaign involving changes to the artwork and copy reflecting each evening’s developments (I like how it’s rendered on BuzzMachine best). I’ve also done C-SPAN TV twice, sitting on the back of my sport coat, focusing just beyond the camera lens, depending on the bug in my ear for cues, reporting on the latest buzz from the left- and rightosphere from the offices of New Media Strategies.

This week my role shifts, and in a dwindling few hours I’ll be flying to St. Paul, Minnesota for the Republican National Convention. As the NMS Blue Team returns from Denver, the Red Team will be shipping out to the metropolitan area where the Coens’ Fargo mostly took place. I travel both in my capacity as a representative of C-SPAN at the convention as well as an official, RNC-credentialed blogger, so I will do my best to share the experience with you.

This will be a new thing for Blog P.I., but a second time for me as a blogger at a GOP convo; in 2004 I was part of Hotline’s convention team in New York City, and I blogged the convention in my off-hours. Then, I took some pictures with my crummy first-ever Sprint camera phone, most of which were uploaded to a server I long since forgot to pay for. This time I’ll be blogging it here in this space, using my iPhone camera and WordPress app, available free of charge from iTunes (which by the way now is really crying out for rebranding).

For the next five days or so, I expect to be taking photos and posting them with minimal presentation, reserving most of my reporting and commentary for a widget from my Twitter account, which will appear here shortly. This is basically the opposite of what Blog P.I. has been in its two years-plus existence: whereas my blogging has primarily comprised several times-weekly essay posts (such as this one) I will instead switch to frequent, quick-hit posts that will take you inside the moment (I’m pretty sure I can do this).

If you’re going to be in the Twin Cities this week, gimme a shout (see the contact page). If you know me from e-mail or the Blogometer or Blog P.I. and want to say hello, drop me a line. If you know of a party, breakfast or similar event that’s either open-invitation or you can extend one, consider me interested. Need a mug, thumb drive or baseball cap emblazoned with the C-SPAN logo? We can probably work something out.

And but so, I’ll get back to packing a week’s worth of my least-unprofessional attire and making sure I don’t leave anything behind, with the DVR playing the Oregon Ducks’ 44-10 victory over the (Huck the) Fuskies as I close up shop here and make my way to the Lesser White North.

More coming soon.

C-SPAN 2.0 (Ft. New Media Strategies)

Published by William Beutler on August 13, 2008 in #DNC08, #RNC08, 2008 Conventions, Barack Obama, Blog Consultants, C-SPAN, Cable News, DNC, John McCain, Metapost, New Media Strategies, RNC, Television, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web video, Website Design, White House '08 and William Beutler. 9 Comments

C-SPAN 2.0 Featuring New Media Strategies
I don’t write about clients often. When I do it’s really something, and this is really something: New Media Strategies will be working through the conventions with C-SPAN, perhaps my favorite Beltway news organization, to run their Convention Hub. The website was designed by NMS partner JESS3, will be maintained by the multi-partisan Public Affairs practice, with editorial oversight and video from the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. I wish I could show it to you. I can’t just yet, but as I said, it’s going to be really something.

What I can offer are details about the Convention Hub microsites. There will be two, one for each convention, with video and blog coverage around the clock:

  • C-SPAN will provide exclusive video from the conventions, and for the first time, this C-SPAN video is searchable, clippable and embeddable. As someone who has tried (unsuccessfully) to jerry-rig an embeddable C-SPAN video in the past, this is a huge leap forward.

  • NMS will feed the latest convention reporting and blogging to the Convention Hub pretty much non-stop. Or as our official language puts it, “extensive real-time blogosphere coverage using NMS’s proprietary combination of software and trained human analysts.”

  • C-SPAN Campaign 2008 LogoMore about that software another time; all I can say is that it answers the questions I’ve asked about such analysis tools.

  • The Hub will also include Twitter feeds of users using the hashtags #RNC08 and #DNC08 (and surely other tags, as their usage rises).

  • The site goes live at c-span.org/politics later this month. The Democratic Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/DNC08 and the Republican Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/RNC08.

  • NMS will have a presence at each convention to help to facilitate coverage and promote the Convention Hub. It certainly doesn’t hurt that we have bloggers credentialed to both (see you in St. Paul).

  • There is more, but I’m not exactly sure what I didn’t see in the press release that’s public, so I’d better hold off for now. At the moment, this is the only public hint on c-span.org:

C-SPAN Convention Hub banner teaser

Meanwhile, the C-SPAN Convention Hub is already drawing praise from one of C-SPAN’s (few) notable critics. The Sunlight Foundation has differed with C-SPAN before over distribution of copyrighted C-SPAN video, so they are enthusiastic about the open nature of the Convention Hubs:

The convention announcement marks a new moment for C-SPAN as a modern Internet information provider. Once a small cable channel with a dream; now with embeddable web video, Twitter hashtags, and aggregated blog posts.

As a longtime C-SPAN junkie, I couldn’t be more proud to play a small part in this project. How dependent am I on the C-SPAN network?

  • I wake up to Washington Journal every weekday morning (my Twitter account will bear this out).

  • Before I found podcasts, I’d listen to streaming Realplayer segments from the program (I still listen to the podcast of Brian Lamb’s Sunday night Q&A).

  • Back in college I would sometimes wake up early (4 a.m.) to catch particular episodes live, such as the first of the Hitchens-Sullivan conversations with Lamb, shortly after 9/11.

  • If it’s the weekend and my television is not on baseball or football, it’s on BookTV.

  • The tagline of my personal blog, The Washington Canard, is: “Where C-SPAN is the local TV news.”

The good news is that it’s a supportable addiction.

And by way of conclusion, a confession: I want this searchable video for my own reasons. On Election night 2004, The Hotline worked all through the night covering the coverage, as the election tipped from Kerry winning the exit polls to Bush winning the popular vote. If you’ve seen my Facebook photo, this is where that crazy image comes from.

As usual, C-SPAN cameras were in the office for Chuck Todd and Vaughn Ververs to offer recaps, also deep into the morning hours. Sometime around 3 o’clock in the morning, I informed friends watching the coverage from back on the West Coast to look carefully: As the cameras rolled, I picked up a plastic trash bin and… well, I danced through the background.

The waltz, I think.

I entered left with vulcanized dance partner, twirling across one shoulder, behind the talking head, past the other shoulder, exiting right. To this date, it’s still my best television appearance. And I look forward to the day, much sooner now, that I can embed this on Blog P.I.

Matthew Yglesias’ Career Reduced to a Timeline

Published by William Beutler on August 11, 2008 in Atrios, Beltway media, Charts and Graphs, Instapundit, Metapost, Startups, Website Design and William Beutler. 8 Comments

As frequent readers of political blogs undoubtedly know, famous-for-DC blogger Matt Yglesias recently gave up the job of many others’ lifetimes, blogging for The Atlantic, to write the same typically eponymous blog he has posted to more or less daily since 2002, now for the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

I say “typically” because Yglesias’ blogging history has taken a few turns more than most bloggers of comparable influence and readership. I wrote about this early on at Blog P.I., when Yglesias gave up simultaneous blogging duties to focus on just one and write a book, the recently published “Heads in the Sand”. I praised the move, but when he changed sites once more just a few months later, I wasn’t inclined to devote another post to it.

Yglesias is of course far from the only blogger to have changed blogs more than once at this point in blog history. I’ve done it myself a few times. At the top levels, Instapundit and Atrios both eventually migrated away from Blogspot [though as a commenter notes, Duncan still uses Blogger], and Reynolds recently moved his site again to Pajamas Media. But that’s nothing compared to Yglesias, a veritable rolling stone even if he is far from a complete unknown.

In order to give a fuller picture of what I’m talking about, I’ve created a handy chart in Keynote that shows at which URLs he has written his blog(s) and when:

Small Yglesias Timeline

This is the small version, of course. Click on the image to visit my Flickr account and see it full-size. For specific dates and the explanation for that short, unlabeled “50% red” rectangle, let’s go below the fold. Otherwise, check back after another four or five Yglesias blogs, when I’ll probably have another update.

Continue reading ‘Matthew Yglesias’ Career Reduced to a Timeline’

Defining Plagiarism Down?

Published by William Beutler on August 11, 2008 in John McCain, Rhetoric, White House '08, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 16 Comments

Taegan Goddard is getting a lot of attention from the leftosphere right now for posting allegations that John McCain’s campaign lifted text from the Wikipedia article about Georgia (the nation-state, not the U.S. state). But as a writer and former professional journalist, I know from plagiarism, and I think McCain’s detractors are jumping on this one a little too quickly.

I think the only reason there is any controversy is because the first quoted passages, about Georgia and Christianity, are obviously very similar. They are also very short. And in all three examples, the text is purely expository: none of it expresses any thoughts, feelings, emotions or other content that would be an obvious case of intentional plagiarism. Additionally, it’s worth noting that historical facts cannot be plagiarized, only their expression. If there is any here, it’s probably inadvertent.

Meanwhile, consider that plagiarized text is almost always longer than original text. This is because the original writer is likely to state things in as few words as possible while the plagiarizer is trying to hide the origin, which means more words. But here, the McCain speech text is shorter in the second and third examples. The second example is the most alike, as ThinkProgress highlights, but the phrases in common are themselves quite pedestrian, and the other word choices are rather different.

The biggest blow to the plagiarism charge, however, is that the third McCain section actually contains information not in the Wikipedia version. The McCain version notes that Mikheil Saakashvili is a “U.S.-educated lawyer”, but this is not in the Wikipedia passage. Sure, this information is available from Saakashvili’s article, but if that’s the charge, I think the McCain campaign can rest easy. Pretty soon they’ll be accused of doing actual research.

I think that about covers it. Of course, if the campaign did plagiarize it, at least Wikipedia is released under a free public license. And as one Wikipedia editor puts it on the Georgia talk page:

Well, at least we’re being useful to lay readers, rather than specialists; and the extracts appear to be factual…

Update: Keith Olbermann just mentioned the “plagiarism” accusations on Countdown a moment ago, so this just might be the next “100 years” claim (which, curiously, I never seem to hear about anymore).

Bloggingheads.tv: The Week in Twitter

Published by William Beutler on August 11, 2008 in Barack Obama, Beltway media, Bloggingheads.tv, John McCain, Metapost, Mitt Romney, New Media Strategies, Online Campaigns, Republicans, Seriously, Technology, Twitter, Web video, White House '08 and William Beutler. 0 Comments

Late last week I made my third appearance on Bloggingheads.tv with Bill Scher of Liberal Oasis; we talked about the politics of Twitter, whether #dontgo is a genuine movement or not, whether Obama is underperforming or overperforming, how to understand the different types of voters, why McCain’s “Celeb” ad was a success, veepstakes and the pointlessness thereof, including my favorite theory on why McCain will choose Romney. Check it out:

I might as well get this out of the way: I am not actually about to eat the viewer. It just looks that way.

When Not to Blog About the White House

Published by William Beutler on August 10, 2008 in Barack Obama, Beltway media, Blogs vs. MSM, George W. Bush, Journalism, Journalist Bloggers, MSM, MSM vs. Blogs, Metapost, National Politics, Newspaper Columnists, Newspapers, Startups, The Politico, Tough Crowd, Twitter, Washington Post, Website Design, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

Politico sign in DC Metro from David Boyle in DC via Flickr.

Last week I traded a series of Twitter “@ messages” with Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor, blogger and media critic. The first one asked:

Maybe you know. Q: why doesn’t Politico have a Ben Smith for the White House? Bets on whether they’ll get one if Obama wins?
He’s got a point. The Politico lists the organization’s designated blogs on its front-page in this order: Ben Smith on Dems, Jonathan Martin on GOP, Shenanigans on Gossip, The Scorecard on Campaigns, The Crypt on Congress, Michael Calderone on Media, James Kotecki on whatever. The Politico is literally blogging about “whatever” but not about “the White House.” So I guessed, in fewer than 140 characters:
Smith-Martin are a package deal, covering both primaries. Politico: more campaign, less governing? But that’s a great idea.
Prof. Rosen suggested in turn:
How about a PI post? Politico columnists for the Dems, Reps, Congress, Media, Gossip, Campaign trail, but no White House?
To which I replied:
Mike Allen certainly covers the WH. But not in blog form, true. Have friends down there, so I can ask. Possible PI post indeed.

And so I did, getting in touch with a half-dozen or so current and former Politico writers, asking for their thoughts on background. I also made an effort to get VandeHarris on the record, but they did not return e-mails by my less-than-rigorously self-enforced deadline.

So here’s what I could piece together:

  • When the Politico launched a little under two years ago, the presidential campaign offered the biggest opportunity first. Politico was first conceived as a newspaper to be called Capitol Leader — “Yet Another Newspaper Aimed at Capitol Hill” as the Washington Post had it. The Executive branch wasn’t even in the picture until John Harris and Jim VandeHei were.

  • As noted above, the newspaper that did emerge hired the much-acclaimed, much-accosted former White House reporter for Time and WaPo, Mike Allen. He writes big stories, is in good with Drudge, and produces content on a daily basis like everyone else. The format of his output is a secondary matter.

  • Most everyone I talked to seemed to assume that no matter who won the presidential election, Politico would increase their White House coverage after the election. After all, it’s the logical continuation of the campaign stories they are covering now. Some said they thought a blog would be involved, and no one volunteered the opposite.

One thing that occurs to me is that other major newspapers have blogs covering the White House as a beat, as do regional newspapers with Washington correspondents, but none of them command major audiences (even when they resort to Olympics T&A).

People care about the big stories that emanate from the White House, and they’ll get that from every newspaper and every political blog inside the Beltway, but few are looking for the day-to-day minutiae. Bush is a lame duck, interest has waned even in some of the bigger stories, and other national newspapers have moved their White House correspondents to the campaign trail.

The answer given reminds me a bit of the response I got in the summer of 2006 when I first wrote about the opening for a “Republican ActBlue”, viz., just wait. It may be worth noting, the person who did finally create one was not yet working on it at that time.

So, yes, the Politico will probably have a White House blog next year. Whether Politico writes the one that Jay Rosen is hoping for remains to be seen.

Photograph by David Boyle in DC via Flickr.

The Cult of Chuck Todd

Published by William Beutler on August 6, 2008 in Cable News, Hotline, MSNBC, Metapost and Website Design. 2 Comments

Hey, I’m as big a fan of Chuck Todd as anyone*, and the Viva Chuck Todd blog from Cerebral Itch is inspired:

Viva Chuck Todd blog header

Especially the e-mail interviews with his grandmother in Florida. But now this is really getting out of hand:

Chuckolytes Unite behind Chuck Todd, whatever that means.

(Click the image to visit the site.) I’m not even sure what “Chuckolyte” is supposed to mean. Is it a play on “electrolyte”? Is it supposed to sound like “chocolate”? Not that either would make any sense. Nor have the folks behind Cerebral Itch explained what it’s supposed to mean. [Update: Via the "Viva Chuck Todd Editorial Dept." in the comments, it is a play on "acolyte." Makes sense now, but a little convoluted.]

A former fellow Hotliner asked the other day what Chuck thinks of his newfound following. I haven’t asked, and I’m not going to bother him with this. This is partly because my answer was: I’m sure he’s aware of it, but I’m also sure he isn’t paying it that much attention.

I will give them this — the graphics are all pretty good, even this weird, stylized icon of the best goatee in cable news:

Chuck Todd icon

*Arguably bigger, since he gave me my first paying job in Washington.

Will the Real Speaker Pelosi Please Stand Up?

Published by William Beutler on August 6, 2008 in Sock puppets, Twitter, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 5 Comments

I enjoy joke Twitter accounts as much as the next person. However, if you’re going to do one, you must be extra careful in keeping the account separate from your main account, which is why I also feel compelled to share the occasional cautionary tale.

Here’s one from today, noticed first by a colleague and concerning the Twitter account @speakerpelosi. Check out these two screen shots:

Speaker Pelosi’s #dontgo tweet

David All’s #dontgo tweet

Whoops! The two posts went up within minutes of each other, which you can’t tell on account of Twitter’s imprecise time stamping (instead it just says both went up 2 hours ago). The tweet is still available on David All’s account, but is now gone from the fake Pelosi account. I suppose that’s about all the proof we need.

Is this just a cheap gotcha? If you think he’s done anything wrong, then perhaps so. I’ve been following the Twitter debate over this, and I think it’s been overdone: I don’t see how it is a TOS violation, and calling it sock puppetry is defining socks down.

I think the only thing necessarily wrong here is carelessness. Fake websites and joke accounts are fun, but they require a degree of caution that not everyone is up for.

If there is one other thing that’s wrong here, it’s the violation of Egon Spengler’s good advice: don’t cross the streams.

Update: It appears that David is now turning into the skid — probably a better way to handle it.

The Gestalt of The Politico

Published by William Beutler on August 4, 2008 in Blogs vs. MSM, Hotline, Journalism, The Politico and William Beutler. 0 Comments

The Gestalt of the Politico

The Politico is produced just a couple floors below the office whence I type these words, and its staff has counted more than a few of my fellow former Hotline colleagues. Heck, I’ve got two of their promotional coffee mugs in my kitchen cupboard at home. So I take great interest in this American Journalism Review article on its first two years in existence. Here’s how it begins:

When veteran Washington Post political reporters John Harris and Jim VandeHei urged their bosses to create a Web site strictly dedicated to politics, management didn’t jump at the idea.

Less than two years later, Politico, the venture they envisioned – and left the Post to take on – is a success, and a politics-only site is “under study” at the Post, according to Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr.

“The proof is in the figures,” says Harris, Politico’s editor in chief. In May, it had 3.5 million unique visitors and 25.1 million page views, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. Editor & Publisher ranked Politico the 10th-most-visited newspaper site that month.

Although Harris would not reveal revenue or advertising numbers, he says Politico’s operations are already self-sustaining and the Allbritton Communications-owned publication should be profitable next year. Print advertising provides about 60 percent of its revenue, VandeHei says.

Under normal circumstances, nobody expects print ventures to be profitable in a short period of time. The last few years have been anything but normal, with newspapers in particular hemorrhaging readers and surgically removing staff writers.

Yet the Politico seems more relevant than ever. Though it is not without its flaws, perhaps this is what makes it so timely. And if it really is just a year from profitability, that’s a good sign for the news industry, right?

Not so fast, says Ezra Klein, in a post at The American Prospect:

Here you have this forward-thinking, primarily virtual venture to create a political news organization that marries old-school reporting values to the speed and the immediacy of the web and it actually works. A year-and-a-half after launch, it’s getting 3.5 million unique visitors per month and 25 million page views. And yet not only is it unprofitable, but 60 percent of its revenues come from advertising in the 27,000 circulation print version. In other words: Politico got the online readership it dreamed of, but it hasn’t come even close to figuring out how to monetize it.

This makes sense. After all, massively popular websites like Facebook, Digg and MySpace can’t figure out how to make money off their audiences — why should a news site? Especially why a news site that’s entirely about politics? Everyone knows that politics isn’t where the money is. Consider, for example, how James Joyner subsidizes his high-minded Outside the Beltway blog with the lower-brow Gone Hollywood.

But not so fast again, says Kevin Drum, at The Washington Monthly:

But there’s another way of looking at it: without a website, The Politico would be dead in the water. If, instead of being almost profitable, it were still hemorrhaging a few million bucks a year with break-even years away, there’s a pretty good chance Allbritton would just shut it down. …

Bottom line: Print gets you respect and big dollar advertisers. The web gets you buzz and a nice chunk of additional revenue. The future — part of it, anyway — belongs to those who can successfully combine multiple media platforms into a single profitable whole. So far, it looks like The Politico has done that.

The premise is more complicated, but fair: the whole point of The Politico was to create an online-offline (and even televised) news hybrid. The Albrittons wouldn’t have bankrolled it in the first place without a website. And I do like the takeaway: the print and web editions can be mutually reinforcing.

This works in a glorified company town like Washington, where lobbying firms and trade associations are always there to buy an ad in the hope of influencing lawmakers and their staff. If this model is replicable in Chicago or Cincinnati or Corvallis, I’m not sure how.

Plus, it’s more than a little discouraging for anyone thinking about trying to create an online-only news organization. Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo do more newsgathering than any twenty of the top political blogs on the right, but they’re still a far cry from being a true professional news organization like The Politico.

All that said, we need more Politicos. I wonder what David Simon would have to say about it.

John Edwards Among the Wikipedians

Published by William Beutler on July 29, 2008 in Asymmetrical Media, Beltway media, Breaking News, Edit Wars, Fox News, Google, John Edwards, Scandal and Wikipedia. 8 Comments

John Edwards’ Wikipedia article is locked until July 30.

Considering that my last two posts were more or less about non-coverage of the John Edwards kerfuffle and highly active Wikipedia articles, I can’t believe I’ve so far missed out on the controversy over what to do with said scandal on said politician’s entry on said reference website.

More than 26,000 words (!)* have been expended on the discussion page associated with the John Edwards encyclopedia entry since the National Enquirer posted a story claiming he was seen leaving a hotel room rented for Rielle Hunter (last week), the woman with whom they have alleged he fathered a child out of wedlock (last year). So far, there is no mention of this story in the article — let alone the existence of Ms. Hunter — and because it has been temporarily locked (see above), it doesn’t appear that anyone will. Not just yet, anyway.

I’ve now read about half the debate, which is the whole extent of it before new people start showing up and re-arguing old points. Based on my own knowledge of how Wikipedia works and what I’ve seen in the press, I’ve come to the conclusion that, even though it sure looks like Edwards’ goose is cooked, Wikipedia’s editors are currently doing the responsible thing by keeping it out of the article.

This post is longer than most, so I am tucking the length of it below the fold. If this subject interests you, follow me.

*When I started writing this post yesterday, it was 15,000. Another 11,000 words (!) went up overnight.

Update: This post was featured in a story by Sarah Stirland at Wired.com today, and points out, there are now a couple sentences about the controversy in the article. I left this comment on the story:

When the page came unlocked, it seems that Wikipedia editors previously uninvolved in the debate came onto the talk page, held a formal vote, and now it’s just a few sentences in the 2008 Presidential campaign section. Or it was until I changed it to “2008 presidential campaign” — a Manual of Style thing.

Continue reading ‘John Edwards Among the Wikipedians’