website statistics

Archive for the 'Asymmetrical Media' Category

What’s So Difficult About a Hat Tip?

Published by William Beutler on May 21, 2008 in Asymmetrical Media, Entertainment, Journalism, MSM, MSM vs. Blogs, Mickey Kaus, Newspapers, Newsweek, Publishing, Scandal, Stephen Colbert, Television and William Beutler. 2 Comments

A movie news and reviews website named Latino Review has a pretty interesting lead article on the front page right now, titled “Why both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter TOTALLY SUCK!” Here’s an extended excerpt, although there is much more in the full piece:

A little over a week ago, on May 14, 2008 we exclusively broke the news that Jason Reitman, the director of Juno was adapting the book UP IN THE AIR which you can read HERE. Later on that afternoon, Jason Reitman’s publicist Bebe Lerner of ID PR called me personally and asked me to update our story. Our scoop forced her to go into spin mode. Bebe wanted us to say that Reitman’s directing deal for UP IN THE AIR was not yet in place. We kindly obliged. In return, the only thing we asked Ms. Lerner to do was to tell the Hollywood trades to either mention or credit us with breaking the story. She agreed. As a precaution, when we broke the story we even emailed Borys Kit over at The Hollywood Reporter and a reporter at Variety. …

Later that night at Midnight (EDT), Variety posted the story on their site which you can read here. Guess what? We weren’t mentioned. We emailed Tatiana Siegel and Michael Fleming (Variety) and kindly requested that their story recognize our contribution and properly credit us. We were ignored.

An hour later at 1A.M., The Hollywood Reporter ran their story without crediting us over here. We were heartbroken.

Later that morning on May 15, 2008, we again emailed Ms. Siegel and Mr. Fleming at Variety and once again we we’re ignored. At least Borys Kit from The Hollywood Reporter was kind enough to email us back, apologize, and explain the situation.

That apology is bittersweet though because Borys Kit and Variety did it to us again today with the news of Jake Gyllenhaal being cast as the lead in Prince of Perisa which we first broke HERE ABOUT A MONTH AND HALF AGO ON APRIL 8TH. This not only happens to us but to all movie websites and bloggers that break exclusive news.

I’d never heard of the site before and unless you’re a serious upcoming movie junkie (once upon a time when I subscribed to Entertainment Weekly, I was) you may not have, either. But here’s one I bet you have: Ain’t It Cool News. According to Latino Review, AICN has been mentioned by Variety and THR “a grand total of 7 times.” That sounds awfully low, but it also doesn’t sound impossible.

Indeed, this not only happens to movie bloggers but all bloggers that break exclusive news or develop new stories. Blog P.I. has noted this phenomenon more than once:

Mickey Kaus, who left the MSM of his own volition for the relative freedom (”no money, no editors”) of the blogosphere, complained about this earlier in the week:

There’s an implicit model underneath [Newsweek’s Jonathan] Alter’s comments–blogs as the minor leagues, Off Off-Broadway, trying out storylines and scoops that may or may not make it to the Big Show. I have to admit I’ve embraced this model myself, as “Model Two.” I think blogs are (for the moment***) particularly suited to functioning as a sort of intermediate tryout area for burgeoning scandals (”undernews”). …

Alter makes big bucks because he’s called on to write about the story of the day at the precise moment it breaks out into the mainstream–and not a moment too soor! If the US bombs a Syrian nuclear reactor, the public wants to know about it right then–and Alter more or less has write about it or have a pretty damn good excuse why not. Newsweek’s editors, in effect, can make Alter jump. He’s very good at it. I’m not.

The problem with the “minor league” model of the blogosphere, is that it’s simply an extension of this “just in time” model of journalism–blogs are a conveyor belt, if you will, delivering news. ideas and angles to the MSM on a precise production schedule.

Of course, we also know that some of the brightest lights in the mainstream media both fear and loathe the blogosphere, simultaneously viewing them as competitors and parasites. To their mind, both are reasons to deny bloggers credit for the work they contribute in this asymmetrical media landscape.

The best defense they can offer, which Latino Review addresses in its rant, is the claim that blogger scoops are unverified gossip, while their reports are confirmed and fact-checked. They can say this without being effectively challenged because a) many bloggers, Kaus notoriously so, will write about unconfirmed stories that rise only to the level of gossip, and b) newspapers and magazines have multiple-source standards and established procedures for confirming their reporters’ work.

But it’s also true that sometimes blogs break legitimate news the MSM initially won’t touch or simply miss, and that sometimes the established news-gathering and -publishing processes break down. But never mind that — mainstream outlets hog the credit and spread the blame.

A blogger’s best hope is to be called up to the big leagues like Justin Rood, who went from TPMmuckraker to ABC News, or Brian Stelter, who went from TV Newser to the New York Times.

But we’re starting to get off track here, so let’s return to Latino Review’s narrow point: what to do when mainstream news organizations won’t acknolwedge true reports that originate in the blogosphere? In the short term, all anyone can do is raise the issue when it happens. Plagiarism is a serious issue in journalism, and eventually, some newspaper will be embarrassed enough that a visionary editor will require its reporters to acknowledge when a story they’re covering started online. Not only will this give credit where it’s due, but it will help news consumers look into the matter for themselves.

And when will this actually happen? My guess is about the same time the Pulitzer committee starts handing out awards for online journalism. In other words, I hope you’re very, very patient.

The Angriest Man in the Blogosphere

Published by William Beutler on April 7, 2008 in Asymmetrical Media, Breaking News, Journalism, Journalist Bloggers, MSM vs. Blogs, Television and William Beutler. 1 Comment

The title of this post derives from: a) a somewhat unfair Mark Bowden essay in The Atlantic criticizing “The Wire” Creator David Simon, and b) Simon’s reputation for showing up in the comments of blogs that discuss his show.

Simon is probably far too busy preparing his next HBO project — “Generation Kill,” set for July — to respond this time. But if he reads this, he should know I consider his conflicted love letter to Baltimore not just better than any other television drama, but much better by far. (I am a typical white person in this regard.) I still love “The Sopranos,” but let’s face it — it’s a cartoon, and not as well-crafted.

That said, I find Simon’s smug insult of the blogosphere in a handful of recent interviews rather less enlightening. For instance, take a long e-mail interview published in the Baltimore City Paper following the series finale in early March. Asked why he didn’t include bloggers in his portrayal of the troubled newspaper industry, he volunteered this hypothetical scene:

INT. GARDEN APARTMENT/ANYWHERE - DAY

A white MALE, thirties, unshaven, sits in his underwear typing on a desktop computer. C.U. on computer screen. As he links to Baltimore Sun coverage off the newspaper’s web site, creating a link on his own blog. The MALE scratches his left testicle, then satisfied, begins typing. C.U. on the moving cursor as commentary ensues.

CUT TO: EXT. DRUG CORNER/WEST BALTIMORE - DAY

This is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but he wasn’t kidding:

The internet is skimming the froth of commentary from the first-generation news gatherers like The Sun. They have parasitically achieved immediacy and relevance by co-opting the debate, the humor, the rage, and the provocation that results from the news product–WITHOUT ACTUALLY INVESTING OR COMMITTING IN ANY SERIOUS WAY TO THE SYSTEMIC ACQUISITION OF THAT NEWS.

And the parasite is killing the host. Is the internet a marvelous tool in myriad ways? Of course. Is it the future? No doubt. But thus far it is not a responsible or viable alternative to a major metropolitan newspaper.

Criminy. This is the mirror image of the kind of blogger triumphalism that died out several years ago. Blogs aren’t killing newspapers (although Craigslist might be) and it’s not far off the misguided rant of Sam Zell, who lit into Google News for supposedly killing newspapers shortly after purchasing the media company which owns… the Baltimore Sun, Simon’s former employer.

Look, Simon is correct that many bloggers depend upon newspapers for stories to comment upon. It’s true that most of them couldn’t do this without the old media’s content. But this is not his unique insight; bloggers themselves have been dealing with this paradox for years. And they are not all sitting around in their pajamas (as another memorable slur had it). Some have set up their own news organizations: Josh Marshall’s TPM empire includes reporters as well as commentators.

Meanwhile, journalists are moving in on bloggers’ turf as well. Reporters such as Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post or my old colleague Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic do almost all of their reporting on the web. This is a genuine ecosystem with much give as well as take. Bloggers who work for free send traffic back to newspapers. And some of those bloggers have bigger audiences than the newspapers.

Of course, bloggers working for free, or very little, is part of what many perceive to be a problem. What bloggers are really doing is taking over the kind of opinion journalism — in politics, music and movies — that were traditionally the province of newspapers. If the blogosphere is killing newspapers, it’s because much of their product is easily done by amateurs who simply didn’t have a platform before the Internet and didn’t have the tools until Pyra Labs cooked up a software program called Blogger while killing time between other projects.

David Simon at a podium, courtesy Brad Searles at Flickr.Moreover, Simon is also is wrong to portray bloggers as adding nothing to the debate. The signature counter-example is when Republican-leaning bloggers asked questions about CBS’s reporting on President Bush’s National Guard service that major news organizations didn’t. Dan Rather is the most prominent scalp, but before that Trent Lott had to step down from his leadership position because of comments about Strom Thurmond’s legacy that Marshall kept alive.

Not all these stories are as prominent, and they don’t all end in firings. More recently, The Smoking Gun fact-checked a Los Angeles Times story fingering Sean Combs for the murder of Tupac Shakur; the story was based on documents that were easily shown to be unreliable, not unlike those CBS relied upon.

It may be that The Smoking Gun is not a blog, but now we’re just quibbling about content management systems. It is also true that TSG is owned by truTV (formerly Court TV), but it began as an independent website, as most blogs are. Speaking of which, Simon gave an interview with a similar rant to Salon — still independent against all odds — and still doing journalism and commentary on a daily basis.

And the competition has also likely caused major news organizations to look closer at their colleagues’ reporting. In the best of cases, it’s forcing news organizations to focus on what they’re best at — where their comparative advantage lies. Obviously that’s reporting, as Simon says. Newsgathering is moving away from newspapers to some extent, but commentary is moving away from newspapers at a rapid clip. In the worst of cases, people like Zell are making bonehead moves that will expedite the shakeout. And the guy scratching his balls in front of his MacBook is just a bit player in a changing media landscape.

I know David Simon isn’t the biggest fan of capitalism, but does he really think that competition is bad? I am sure he can’t really think that more speech is bad.

Image courtesy Brad Searles on Flickr.

Stuff Conservative People Like

Published by William Beutler on March 26, 2008 in Asymmetrical Media, Entertainment, Race relations, Seriously and William Beutler. 6 Comments

Stuff White People Like, the meteorically ascendant concept blog categorizing fetish objects, stereotypical behaviors and obnoxious trends of what one might call the “typical white person,” has a conservative slant. Really.

I’m sure that wasn’t the intent of Christian Lander, a Canadian copywriter living in Los Angeles who started the blog on a whim in late January and already has a book deal. But it certainly has the effect.

That’s because his ongoing list avoids going after the kind of “aw shucks” Middle Americans Jeff Foxworthy tenderly mocked in his rise to relative stardom more than a decade ago. Instead, Lander zeroes in on the accoutrements of the kind of upper-class, highly-educated, self-conscious white people variously known as Lexus liberals (Prius liberals?) or latte liberals. What David Brooks would call Bobos, minus twenty years. Like Foxworthy, he’s making fun of himself. But he also does so in greater detail, and with more bite.

Take for example #62 Knowing What’s Best for Poor People:

White people spend a lot of time of worrying about poor people. It takes up a pretty significant portion of their day.

They feel guilty and sad that poor people shop at Wal*Mart instead of Whole Foods, that they vote Republican instead of Democratic, that they go to Community College/get a job instead of studying art at a University.

It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.

Or #82 Hating Corporations:

One of the more popular white person activities of the past fifteen years is attempting to educate others on the evils of multi-national corporations. White people love nothing more than explaining to you how Wal*Mart, McDonalds, Microsoft, Halliburton are destroying the Earth’s culture and resources. …

When engaging in a conversation about corporate evils it is important to NEVER, EVER mention Apple Computers, Target or Ikea in the same breath as the companies mentioned earlier. White people prefer to hate corporations that don’t make stuff that they like.

And we’re not even talking about the kind of cultural affectations that any economic libertarian city-dweller might recognize as themselves, too. See #6 Organic Food:

Because of the balance of global wealth and power, there is a general assumption that white people are pretty shrewd. And for the most part, history has proven this to be true. But white people have one great weakness: organic food.

As seen by the image on the left - when faced with eating food that has been processed and loaded with nitrates, sodium and saturated fat, or organic rat poison, 10/10 they will take the rat poison.

I’m not just cherry-picking from the blog. In a Los Angeles Times article published barely a month into the blog’s phenomenal run, Lander evinced a disdain for the provincial lefty superiority he mocks in his blog posts:

Lander is less concerned with cross-ethnic and racial relations than he is with how whites treat each other. As a onetime graduate student in the Midwest, he got tired of coastal condescension of the fly-over states and the glib assumption that “red staters are evil and stupid.”

“Too many white people don’t like to be reminded that they’re white. They like to think that white people are those evil corporate right-wingers or the uneducated masses who vote the wrong way. But ‘enlightened whites’ are white people too and have just as much of a group mentality as they think the red staters have.”

But, let’s not make too much of this. From the same article:

Lander doesn’t want you to think he’s angry or taking himself too seriously. “First and foremost, it’s satire; it’s funny,” he says. “I’m trying to make people laugh.”

Yet on the rare occasions where Lander does take a swipe at conservatives or conservatism, it still veers back toward making fun of liberals post haste. Take #35 The Daily Show/Colbert Report:

White people love to make fun of politics, especially right wing politics. It’s a pretty easy target and makes for some decent humor, but white people are actually starting to believe that these two shows are becoming legitimate news sources.

“Oh, I don’t watch the news,” they will say. “I watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. You know, studies show that viewers of those shows are more educated than people who watch Fox News or CNN.”

Like so. One could also see this as liberal humor at its best: avoiding easy jokes about President Bush mangling his words (yes, Jacob Weisberg is still riding this horse into the ground — so far he might make it to China in time for the Olympics) and looking inward to mock one’s own absurdities. And that would probably be true, but they’re not mutually exclusive options.

Let’s also stipulate — the next time someone says there’s no such thing as conservative humor, just point them to Stuff White People Like. If they’re white and liberal, chances are they will enjoy a joke at their own expense. If they’re white and conservative, chances are they’ll find it even funnier.

A better question would be: Could a conservative do this just as well? Anybody who’s read one of P.J. O’Rourke’s classics — think Parliament of Whores or All The Trouble in the World — can say unequivocally, yes. But it’s also possible a lesser talent could really screw it up. In fact, it’s more than possible.

I suppose a symmetrical analogy for black people could be Bill Cosby’s complaints about the self-abegnating habits of lower-class African Americans. But Cosby isn’t trying to be funny. The real analogy was Comedy Central’s brilliant Chappelle’s Show. But Dave Chappelle famously walked away from that, fearing he was doing more harm than good. Which is too bad, especially in a world where Black People Love Us! already existed.

In the meantime, I’ve just discovered Michael Cobb’s Stuff Black People Like. Where’s his book deal? Oh, that’s right — he’s a conservative.

Exclusive! Must Credit Radar! Even Though Radar Didn’t Break It!

Published by William Beutler on December 31, 2007 in Asymmetrical Media, Attribution, Hillary Clinton, MSM vs. Blogs and William Beutler. 1 Comment

Big Head DC, the disreputable local gossip rag that routinely outdoes Wonkette in the disreputable gossip department, reports on Radar, Wonkette and the Ragin’ Cajun:

Writing for Wonkette competitor, Radar magazine, yesterday, [Wonkette editor John] Clarke [Jr.] reported that “a source close with” James Carville told him that the Democratic political guru plans to join Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Interestingly, the piece is titled “Radar Exclusive,” yet Big Head DC revealed the same information over sixteen days earlier.

This is not the first time Radar has claimed an “exclusive” when the same information has been previously reported by bloggers.

It’s annoying enough when brick-and-mortar journalistic enterprises won’t give credit to their amateur counterparts, but when a (currently) online-only publication does the same, repeatedly, what can you say?

From now on, I’ll assume that every “Radar Exclusive” is in fact stolen from a blog.

Barack Obama and the Souljahsphere

Published by William Beutler on December 11, 2007 in Asymmetrical Media, Barack Obama, Campaigns, Democrats, Health Care, Internecine Battles, James Webb, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Netroots, New York Times, Oppo Research and White House '08. 0 Comments

Yesterday afternoon, Chris Bowers at Open Left tore into the Obama campaign, ostensibly for releasing a “fact check” calling attention to contradictory statements about Obama’s health care plan by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, which Bowers erroneously called “oppo”:

It is certainly disturbing that Obama is attacking a leading progressive voice in a media system where progressive opinion journalists are few are far between. What is even more disturbing is that this is not the first time the Obama campaign has considered doing this. Back during the Donnie McClurkin fiasco, it has been confirmed to me from multiple sources that the Obama campaign was preparing opposition research papers of this sort against some one of the progressive bloggers who were speaking ill of him at the time …

This is a campaign that appears willing to go negative against a wide range of progressive media figures should those figures step out of line and criticize Obama campaign decisions. Given that, I became personally worried that an Obama nomination would, at some point in the future, result in a public smear campaign, possibly directed by the a new White House communications department, against me and / or many of my friends and colleagues.

Bowers no doubt reserves the right to criticize President Obama, but apparently believes he and his ideological allies are above reproach. Look, the instinct to react negatively to criticism is not unsurprising or even wrong. But Obama is merely asserting himself against a critic who had praised him before. That’s not unsurprising or wrong, either. But rather than address the specifics, Bowers’ response amounts to “Do you know who I am?” Or more accurately: “Do you know who he is?”

Ezra Klein at least acknowledges there is substance to the debate:

It’s not only the actual attacks that are weak (most of them rely on misinterpreting one comment, then misinterpreting the next, then pretending there’s a contradiction)…

yet he can’t escape progressive identity politics, either:

…but, seriously, it’s Paul Krugman.

And in any case, that isn’t Bowers’ problem. Trust me, conservative bloggers are ignored by Republicans more than progressives think they are by Democrats. Bowers just perceives any slight from those more powerful as unfair marginalization — when in fact it is actually the opposite.

It’s difficult to imagine conservative bloggers being terribly upset about a Republican campaign rebutting — not even collecting or distributing oppo on — say, David Brooks. Perhaps Paul Krugman simply has a reputation among the left unrivaled by any major commentator on the right, among the right. Or maybe Brooks isn’t the right analogy. Nobody speaks of him as the “most conservative voice in the mainstream media,” only the most conservative voice on the NYT op-ed page. Are the left’s celebrated public figures more important to them than any celebrity on the right? If so, is this because contemporary progressives have fewer established wins than the right, and hence a more grievance-based, underdog mentality? If so, this would explain why an attack on one might be considered an attack on all. So maybe there is no analogy. Among conservative bloggers, no one’s ego is dependent upon Republican campaigns genuflecting to George Will, Charles Krauthammer or Jonah Goldberg.

Is there anyone who would qualify? Probably Glenn Reynolds and Ed Morrissey, maybe Michelle Malkin and perhaps even Hugh Hewitt (although his influence has been sliding badly as of late). But here’s the key thing: This doesn’t hold if the campaign has a point.

If a Republican office-seeker responded unfairly to a salient criticism from a conservative blogger (or even columnist) on an issue that conservatives thought important, then sure. If Malkin criticizes a Republican candidate, only for the candidate to point out that Malkin had praised the same candidate on the same issue before — as is the case with Krugman — then she would take her lumps like anyone else. She’d have some knee-jerk defenders, but no one would write, “seriously, it’s Michelle Malkin.”

After all, Bowers’ other complaints about the Obama campaign are more reasonable. Among them he notes “the poor blogosphere outreach, the willingness to triangulate against left-wing strawmen, and incessant, beltway-pundit friendly talk about the need to ‘fix’ Social Security” are things that would annoy conservative bloggers — not about reforming Social Security, of course, but perhaps advocating amnesty-first, enforcement-maybe immigration reform.

Yet his main grievance is that Obama might push back against critics from the left, including that special class, bloggers. As to that point, a few hours later, TPM’s Greg Sargent checked in with the Obama campaign, which denied collecting oppo research on multiple bloggers:

The Obama campaign put together oppo docs against progressive bloggers hitting the campaign over the mess surrounding antigay folk singer McClurkin? That’s a strong charge — but the Obama camp is denying it. I checked in with a campaign spokesman, who told me: “This is absolutely not true.”

If it turns out that Bowers was correct in that they were researching just one blogger and their denial refers to more than one bloggers, then his complaint would be better justified. Until then, Bowers’ insinuation that liberal bloggers are above the political fray is silly and further evidence that, like all practitioners of identity politics, consider themselves a protected class. They are not. If you attempt to influence political campaigns, you’re in the fray and subject to scrutiny like any other political actor from dark horse challenger to 527 chieftain. Last year, bloggers in Virginia faced up to this fact, when rumors swirled that then Senator-elect Jim Webb had collected information on conservative and liberal bloggers alike. Those charges were denied and never substantiated, but it was plausible and it should have been a wake-up call.

Then again, in an update a few hours later, Bowers revealed that he was, in fact, just overreacting:

This isn’t about kissing blogosphere ass, Joe Anthony, the tone that Obama takes on the campaign, the specifics of the Krugman fight, the use of left-wing strawmen, how to change Republican behavior in Congress, or that Obama doesn’t have a right to disagree with progressives. Or at least, isn’t about the specifics of any of those cases, but instead about the broad and contradictory pattern to which they point. This is about trying to make sense of a strange and contradictory relationship that contains so many good things and so many bad things all at the same time.

It’s not you, it’s me? Well, at least that clears things up! Meanwhile, a clearer-headed, more insightful, more sensible take from Digby:

Perhaps [responding to Krugman is] the smart move. It has long been known by just about everyone who matters that the rank and file activists of the Democratic party are a huge liability. And anyway, where are we going to go? Mike Huckabee? Ron Paul? We have no choice. So, no harm no foul. Running to the right of even Hillary Clinton on health care and social security and using GOP talking points and symbolism is probably all upside. … Obama is a tremendously exciting and talented politician and I would vote for him against any Republican out there without blinking an eye. But as a certified DFH, I really wish he weren’t running this way. Paul Krugman most certainly is not the enemy and neither am I.

Unfortunately, she updated later to agree with Bowers. But at least Digby understands that they’ve been Sister Souljahed. It’ll happen to conservative bloggers, too. And while it might not be easy, they should consider it a sign they’ve arrived.

Toward a RedState/Human Events YouTube Debate

Published by William Beutler on December 2, 2007 in Asymmetrical Media, Blogs vs. MSM, C-SPAN, CNN, Cable News, Daily Kos, Debates, Elections, Fred Thompson, Google, Hillary Clinton, MSM vs. Blogs, National Politics, New Media Strategies, Online Campaigns, RedState, Republicans, Technology, White House '08 and YouTube. 2 Comments

RedState and Human Events would do a better job than CNN and YouTube

On Thursday I gave a somewhat-impulsive thumbs-up to RedState’s call for CNN to sack their political director. National Review’s indispensible Jim Geraghty has outlined eight editorial oversights (four quite serious, four merely problematic) in CNN’s vetting of the televised questioners. One or two would be enough to generate a blogswarm, but eight looks like malicious negligence, and it subseqently became a full-fledged blogstorm. Worse, CNN’s statement didn’t even attempt to be a “non-apology apology” — they’re digging in their heels and claiming:

The issues raised during last night’s debate were legitimate and relevant no matter who was asking the questions. The vested interests who are challenging the credibility of the questioners are trying to distract voters from the substantive issues they care most about.

Did somebody say “fake but accurate”? As QandO’s McQ notes, the hubris implicit in that statement is galling:

Says who? Says CNN, that’s who. It is the network that chose the questions that would be aired. Consequently what aired had nothing to do with what voters found to be the substantive issues of the day, but instead had everything to do with — say it with me — what CNN decided were the substantive issues of the day.

I stand by my initial judgement — in fact, I am all the more sure of it — but I realize it isn’t going to happen. (FWIW, CNN’s political director is Sam Feist; one wonders if indie rock/iPod Nano darling Feist could do any worse). And the truth is it wouldn’t make up for the debacle, so I concede that a change is not imperative. What would be better is a pro-active solution — that is, another debate. And so I am very intrigued by a new proposal, this time issued jointly by RedState and Human Events (both subsidiaries of Eagle Pubishing), for a “do-over debate”:

We have a base of readers who represent the Republican wing of the Republican Party. You — and the Republican Party — deserve to face the questions posed by undecided Republicans, not Democratic activists. We will solicit and obtain YouTube videos from those people and vet each questioner to establish that they are — really — undecided Republicans. We hope to include soldiers in the field in Iraq, Young Republicans, and others who still have not decided among you.

Today, allow us to make you this offer: We will organize a debate at a time and date amenable to you all. We will work with a national broadcaster to broadcast the debate as well as offer it online. We, not the liberal drive by media, will ensure the questioners are who they say they are. And we will choose them based on criteria that will be fully disclosed to you all which ensure the questioners aren’t activists for any Democratic candidate.

I think this is a terrific idea. The MSM no longer has a monopoly on campaign coverage, so why should they have a monopoly over organizing candidate debates? The only good answer is because they control the airwaves. Could Fox News be persuaded to air it? Possibly. C-SPAN would certainly set up a camera, it could be simulcast on the web, and it would obviously be made available on YouTube. Heck, put it on the History Channel. I bet more people would watch it.

And if so desired, Google/YouTube (GooTube, if you will) need not formally be involved. Eagle’s online outlets could independently create a YouTube account, put RedState’s Erick Erickson and Human Events’ Jed Babbin in a short video soliciting questions, and anyone could post their videos as responses. Eagle could narrow them down, submit them to a hand-picked group of conservative bloggers to identify the best, and blog readers would be invited to vet the questions themselves. The ultimate decisions should still be made by the organizing consortium, but the crowdsourcing would be a substantial (if not bulletproof) way to head off complaints from conservatives. Necessarily, this would aso give the campaigns time to study the questions and prepare well-thought out answers — this too would be different from the “gotcha” element that annoyed so many in the CNN/YouTube debate.

Of course, the last point hints at the major reason why it wouldn’t happen. Here I’ll note: I cannot formally join the call for such a debate; as I point out whenever relevant, New Media Strategies consults for the Fred Thompson campaign, and I won’t put the campaign or my employer on the spot. Same goes for the other campaigns, though — the Iowa caucuses are now a month away and no campaign should be pressured to join a debate in a time frame this limited. The CNN/YouTube debate required months, not to mention a “Save the Debate” movement by Republican bloggers, to happen at all. So don’t hold your breath, and save your Facebook campaigns. But it’s a terrific idea.

To address another issue: A few commenters on the above-mentioned post here, including some friends of Blog P.I., apparently read my criticism of the debate as a complaint about tough questions. If I understand them correctly, they feared a not-yet-proposed alternative would result in “softball” questions. I replied that they were mistaken, and pointed to a prediction by Patterico following the Democratic CNN/YouTube debate in July:

The Democrat debate was dominated by questioners asking: “Why can’t you be more leftist?” And the Republican debate will be dominated by questioners asking: “Why can’t you be more leftist?”

That pretty much nailed it. The problem is not that the issues CNN is so pleased with itself for raising were illegitimate or unfair. They were not. It’s that those Dem-leaning questions asked by Dem-leaning YouTubers were general election questions, and the general election audience generally (as it were) was not watching. Certainly Republicans should keep an eye toward next November, but a debate for a Republican primary should focus on issues that matter to Republicans. Say what you will, but “don’t ask, don’t tell” just isn’t one of them, and it doesn’t help Republican voters make up their minds. It does no good when Google flies a publicly-identifiable Hillary Clinton supporter in to berate the candidates about their position on the issue. (One which, I would like to point out, is unlikely to be a major factor in the general, either.) In fact, it rises to the level of farce when Anderson Cooper asks said Hillary supporter to rule on whether or not the candidates answered his question and the guy says “no,” yet anyone who was paying attention knows they did answer his question honestly, but he just didn’t like their answers.

True, CNN did air questions about illegal immigration, gun rights and religion. But RedState/Human Events would query those subjects, too. They might even include a question about the Bible that doesn’t conform to slack-jawed yokel stereotypes (sorry, Joseph Dearing, whomever you are, but when you assert that your question tells us “everything we need to know” about the GOP hopefuls, that’s how you come across). Although various writers at RedState and Human Events have evinced support for various candidates (Erickson most notably in favor of Fred Thompson, I can’t help but note), I would argue they have a greater interest than CNN in a strong, fair debate that includes difficult questions for all the candidates, because (as Erickson and Babbin point out) it’s their audience who will be deciding which Republican goes on to the general election.

In short, RedState and Human Events would be better curators of a Republican debate than CNN.

Because I am confident that this do-over debate will not come to pass, I encourage both to organize similar debates for Senate and House candidates, whose primaries mostly will not be decided until further into next year. This would give them time to work out the kinks, gain experience appealing to local television channels for airtime, and give them credibility in proposing such a debate in 2012 (er, 2011, but you know what I mean). I call on Pajamas Media, NRO, Heritage or any other independent, webbish, GOP-leaning organization to do the same. Now that I think about it, I call on Josh Marshall’s TPM empire to do the same for Democrats.

You know what would be awesome next fall, sometime after the conventions and before the general election, Commission on Presidential Debates-permitting? A RedState/Daily Kos YouTube debate.

The Kos Bubble and Rove 2.0

Published by William Beutler on November 20, 2007 in Apple, Asymmetrical Media, Blogger Panels, Blogging Officials, Brick-and-mortar consultants, Daily Kos, Digg, George Allen, Karl Rove, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Netroots, Newsweek, Tech Blogosphere, Technology, Television, Tom DeLay, Web 2.0, William Beutler and Yahoo!. 7 Comments

Whether or not Kossack heads actually exploded throughout the leftosphere this weekend, I cannot say. Reports will trickle in… or not. But Newsweek’s experiment of pairing the Great and Powerful Kos with the Great and Powerful Rove is off and running, and it’s not too soon to draw some preliminary conclusions. First, in terms of drawing blog hype, Newsweek could hardly done a better job of securing two more polarizing and potentially intriguing figures — for the left and right each, I’m having a hard time coming up with any two people in politics who inspire as much passion in their detractors outside of current and former presidents.

I’ll leave the reviews to others, but 24 hours after both stories hit the web, how are they doing in terms of measurable attention? Newsweek provides two metrics that we must assume are the most accurate, simply because they are based on internal numbers, even though Newsweek does not provide actual numbers. I understand why they don’t release them, but if the Digg-ification of the Internet continues apace, they will eventually. So which of the two was e-mailed more than the other?

Newsweek's Most E-mailed Stories

As we see, this was a clear win for Rove. As of about 10 p.m. on Monday night, Rove’s piece has been e-mailed more often — but we still don’t know by how much. Second, Newsweek’s list of the top 10 most viewed stories:

Newsweek's Most Viewed Stories

Even without precise figures, this one paints a clearer picture: Rove is at number one, and Kos is nowhere to be found. Short of a Chris Bowers Google bomb, Rove is the greatest and most powerful.

How can this be? Kos is arguably at the zenith of his fame, with appearances on The Colbert Report and Meet the Press earlier in the year, still reigning as one of the RNC’s favorite bogeymen. Rove on the other hand is out of the White House and for all anyone knows, out of national politics. It may say something about Time readers just not knowing who Kos is, but I’m operating under the assumption that the online version of Newsweek reaches what IPDI has termed the “Poli-fluentials.” To be sure, time will tell. One possibility is that Kos, with his eminently Internet-based platform, stands to do better over the long run. But I also ran the Newsweek column’s permalinks through Technorati to find out how many times each had been linked by another blog. It wasn’t close. At all:

Ouch. Then again, if you look at the top blogs linking to both articles (results above are sorted by authority) a clear majority hail from the left. Maybe the left still remains more interested in Rove than the right is in Kos.

Another possibilty is more subjective, but I’ll offer it anyway: Maybe Kos just isn’t that interesting a writer. Like more than a few in my line of work, I’ve been perusing Matt Bai’s “The Argument” lately, and Bai does little to conceal his skepticism of Moulitsas’ political knowledge. Now, I have read both articles, and I did find Rove’s much more interesting. But don’t take my word for it — the blogosphere seems to agree. I have also seen both speak in a public setting, and perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, but the seasoned campaign veteran was certainly more compelling than his younger upstart opponent. And there was the time when Kos got a tryout with ideo-journalistic Washington, but didn’t quite make the cut.

An aside: Last week I went with my colleagues and associates Jon Henke, Leslie Bradshaw and Jesse Thomas to see Rove co-keynote Yahoo’s Citizen 2.0 midday bash with Max Cleland (!) at the Willard Intercontinental. They’ve already written about it in detail, but I can’t help noting that their study merely put a slightly different gloss on the IPDI report linked above, i.e. “Citizen 2.0″ has replaced “Poli-fluential.”

Just about Rove, however, I must say: His arguments and observations were as well-honed as any “Internet expert” I’ve seen address a political crowd. And Rove knew what he was talking about: He recalled early computer hard drives he owned, admitted to his membership in the Apple cult, delivered a paean to Moore’s Law, and mused about the long-term effects of TiVo and time-shifting. He spoke of the Allen/Webb race (though he didn’t use the word “Macaca”) and cited studies of the blogosphere like any contributor to TechPresident. That’s why I was a little surprised and disappointed to see Michael Bassik dismiss him as “Not Citzen 2.0″ when in fact the definition given by Yahoo! makes Rove almost the perfect example. I was less surprised to see Think Progress willfully misinterpret the goings-on, but Henke has that one covered. Say what you will about Karl Rove, but don’t say he’s not a geek.

On the other hand, he did mispronounce “Kos.”

P.S. This is as good a time as any to share this photo, taken with my iPhone, of Karl Rove taking a picture of me with his iPhone:

Karl Rove and his iPhone, taken with my iPhone

The man on the right is former Senator Cleland. Believe it or not, they got along like old chums. My guess, and it’s just a hunch, is that Cleland is better at hiding his thoughts and feelings than his boisterous persona suggests. The man on the left appears to be from an Aphex Twin video.

P.P.S. What if Rove turned to blogging? Tom DeLay’s occasionally updated blog is in relaunch limbo at the moment, which provides not the best precedent (despite my own pleasantly surprised initial reaction) but then DeLay was never known as a thinker, either, and left official Washington under considerably less triumphant circumstances. So I think Rove could do well, and I bet he would even write it. If he consented to participate in rightosphere activities like appearing on Heading Right Radio (warning: automatic audio), he could quickly become one of the most influential voices on the Internet. But even then, I’m not sure he’d be the most influential voice on the right.

P.P.P.S. Then again, we haven’t even begun to address the matter of which fledgling columnist Google thinks is the greater and more powerful.

Web 2.0 May Change Media, But You Can’t Trace Web 2.0

Published by William Beutler on October 31, 2007 in Asymmetrical Media, Blogger Panels, Blogs vs. MSM, CNN, Direct Mail, E-mail, Journalism History, Journalist Bloggers, MSM vs. Blogs, Meatspace, Metapost, Newspapers, Technology, Web video and William Beutler. 1 Comment

Not to turn Blog P.I. into a catalog of things I did last weekend, but on Saturday I sat on a panel at the Phillips Foundation’s fall retreat for recipients of its journalism fellowships (about which more below). My co-panelists were Jose Vargas from the Washington Post, Amy Schatz from the Wall Street Journal, and Abbi Tatton from CNN. I was a replacement fill-in, which is why I was the lone non-journalist — but hey, I was a licensed journalist not too long ago, so, close enough for (the discussion of) government work.

The subject was how technology is changing politics — a mandate broad enough to take it in almost any direction. And if anything, I was the wet blanket of the panel. My opening comments focused on how the Internet is changing politics in ways not unique compared to previous technologies, techniques and politics. I didn’t get all the details out on Saturday, but the argument went something like:

Radio : FDR’s fireside chats :: Blogs : The Fred File* and ‘04/’06 predecessors

Television : Nixon/Kennedy Debate :: YouTube/Internet video : “Macaca”

Direct mail/voter files : Richard Viguerie’s first claim to fame :: E-mail lists/subscribers : Why John Kerry matters in 2008

Radio and blogging both gave candidates ways to bypass established media channels and speak directly to supporters and voters. Television and online video can reframe the public’s perception of political events. Direct mail then as e-mail now communicate around the media as well as solicit campaign funds from an (ideally) opt-in crowd.

Panels such as these are at their best when the most interesting comments come from the audience. One theme that emerged in discussion was how even print journalists are being asked to produce short video (and audio) segments for the Internet when reporting from the road. To some extent, each of my fellow panelists had witnessed or dealt with this issue. It’s an interesting and even logical development, as online ad revenues rise compared to the dead tree edition. One also has to also wonder how thin it stretches their already-dwindling reportorial resources. At least in the Morissettean sense, it’s ironic that the migration of news content to the web coincides with layoffs owing to competition from the web.

My friend Robert Bluey, also present, volunteered that his alma mater, Ithaca College, is now offering a course it calls “Backpack Journalism.” He explains in an interesting post at his own blog:

Students are given a backpack with a MacBook, video camera, digital camera, a recording device and other instruments to produce a story. After receiving their assignments, the students are dispatched to cover the story using multiple media.

I find this new kind of journalism fascinating. However, I also sympathize with working journalists who are primarily writers, who may now find themselves needing to acquire new skills to adapt to a changing industry. My co-panelists are among the lucky ones — I suspect they’ll learn new tricks more quickly than some of their older colleagues.

One of whom might be Michael Scully, former journalist, journalism professor and blogger (but not the writer from The Simpsons). I tend to share his fears about what “backpack journalism” will mean in some (many, most?) newsrooms:

If Backpack Journalism is about sending ONE person out into the field to report a story, than Backpack Journalism is a travesty. It’s an accountant’s dream but an editor’s nightmare. Accountants love it because you’re sending one person out into the field to produce the work of three people; it’s an editor’s nightmare because the quality of the work is diminished.

I submit that the true business model for New Media must be to send THREE people out into the field. Let one report, one produce, one shoot. Each skill is very important, each skill is very different, each skill has a professional value.

On the other hand, someone who could do all three well would be highly sought-after and accordingly compensated. If the job description caught on, it would presumably spur different kinds of students to enter journalism in the first place. Myself, I actually applied to film school out of high school, but instead pursued print journalism in-state, as I that proved more realistic. But if becoming a “backpack journalist” was an option at Allen Hall, I’d at least have given it the old college try. Heck, I might have even finished my Journalism double-major.

· · ·

And you know, I bet we can fit this into a hastily-assembled anti-triumphalist SAT problem like the ones above:

Print Journalists : The Internet :: Pre-Internet Journalists, I.e. Mostly Print Journalists : Every New Media Before the Internet

Note: As I promised above, a bit more about the Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellowship Program. They are presently seeking applicants for 2008. If you’re inclined toward constitutional democracy and classically liberal economics, and have less than ten years of journalism experience, then you (yes, you!) could land $50,000 to $75,000 to write on a topic of your choosing. Details here. Tell ‘em Blog P.I. sent you.

*I was also the only panelist with a client of current interest, so it made for a few interesting moments as the subject was indeed taken in almost any direction. Hats off to the Standard’s Michael Goldfarb for trying to get me to make news.

Dear Leaderboard, or: Mmmm… Pie Chart!

Published by William Beutler on October 25, 2007 in Asymmetrical Media, Blogs vs. MSM, Cable News, Charts and Graphs, MSM, Memeorandum, Newspapers, Tech Blogosphere, Technorati and William Beutler. 2 Comments

When Gabe Rivera unveiled his Techmeme Leaderboard a few weeks back, we politically-minded Internet junkies experienced something akin to spending Christmas morning watching another kid open presents. Okay, that’s pushing it. Maybe it’s like comparing your Easter morning haul with a friend who received a Nintendo game, when all you got was chocolate (I’ve forgiven, but never forgotten).

Top 25 sites on the Memeorandum LeaderboardIt made sense, though. The bloggers who show up on Techmeme are much more likely to track themselves on that site than are the bloggers who populate Memeorandum likely to watch themselves. Of couse, all tech bloggers are geeks in good standing, while only some of us political types are. So they get the goodies first.

But as expected, Rivera rolled out his Memeorandum Leaderboard, and he did so this week. As he explained, the Leaderboard

identifies 100 of [the most influential political blogs], ranking sources simply by how much they’ve appeared on memeorandum in the past month. It updates every 20 minutes and offers archives of past days. … The memeorandum Leaderboard doesn’t tell the whole story of course. For instance, influential curators of opinion like Instapundit.com don’t figure highly given memeorandum’s preference for longer articles. Yet it remains a handy portal to many of the sources with the greatest role in framing and shaping the national debate.

It’s handy, all right, and it fills a need. Five years ago, in a very different political blogosphere, The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem was the definitive guide to the top political blogs. But with Rob Neppell (née N.Z. Bear) now focused on other projects, it’s fallen into obsolescence. The Technorati Top 100 was a welcome addition, but its inbound link counts were sometimes unreliable, it never focused on politics per se, and as I pointed out last year, the political blogs have to share the top 100 with many other genres. Since then, Technorati has lost its direction in other ways, and it’s too soon to tell whether founding CEO Dave Sifry’s departure will change things. I’m not counting on it.

So while Rivera’s list is worth analyzing, it should come as no surprise that the analysis so far has come from more tech-centric bloggers. For example, here’s TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley marveling at how important the legacy media remains, especially compared to the ’sphere in which he moves:

According to the list, based on story headlines on Memeorandum the New York Times, Washington Post and AP control over 22.4% of political headlines. The Atlantic Online, The National Review and CNN (twice) also make the top ten, leaving slim pickings for political blogs. … The (perhaps sad) state of the political blogosphere stands in contrast to the tech blogosphere, which dominates the equivalent Techmeme Leaderboard list, holding approx 64% of all spots.

The observation is fair, but I object to the judgment call. For one thing, defining the subject matter of Memeorandum as “politics” is far too narrow. Foreign affairs, U.S. diplomacy, domestic policy, electoral politics and sundry current events make up the subject matter at Memeorandum — a much broader spectrum of news and analysis than what TechMeme covers. Moreover, these subjects often require reporting from around the country and around the world that even in the digital age aged institutions with more resources than resolve continue to dominate. Most of the stories on TechMeme emanate from the Silicon Valley; Memeorandum spans the world at large.

GOP Internet consultant Patrick Ruffini has already taken a crack at evaluating what it says about the Right’s online fortunes. What it says is that Republicans and conservatives need to reinvent their online channels of communication:

Lots of bloggers have been over to Iraq, a commitment which makes the professional activists in the leftosphere look like dilettantes. Guys like Jeff [Emanuel], Bill Roggio, and Michael Yon have been the advance guard for this stuff. But nothing little has been done to institutionalize their work, to create counter-memes by controlling the upstream information flow through a system for nurturing these upstart war reporters. The failure to develop an effective counter-narrative out of Iraq is reflective of the “conservative message machine” and its reluctance to think outside the box.

Myself, I’m still thinking it over. To get started on the process, I separated all the websites on this afternoon’s Leaderboard into a few arbitrary categories and added up the percentages accorded to each. I then created a simple chart with Zoho Sheet (beating out Google Docs by a slim margin and NeoOffice by a much wider one) to visualize the statistical spread. Others will have different ways of breaking this out — and I may have different ways at a later date — but here’s what I came up with:

Memeorandum Leaderboard (by source type) - http://sheet.zoho.com

I should note the numbers taken off the leaderboard do not actually add up to 100%. That’s something I intend to ask Rivera about, and because the Zoho chart rounds them up to reach a sensible 100%, here are the actual numbers as I compiled them:

ARBITARY CATEGORYINEXACT NUMBER
Newspaper/Wire Content 38.65%
Liberal Blogs & Websites 14%
MSM-Backed Online Content11.4%
Conservative Blogs & Websites10.25%
Cable/TV News-Based Content4.7%
Primary Sources Online0.98%
Hard to Categorize Websites0.86%

This dilutes MSM-owned websites only just a bit; as you can see, print and wire-based news stories commanded much, much more attention than websites based on television news, so you can squint and add that back in if you’d like. Add in MSM-created content specifically for the web, and it’s up over 60%. That is also a more arbitrary but, I would argue, more necessary category — “MSM Online” is where I placed any ostensibly non-partisan blog and any non-blog content by more partisan sources. These days established media organizations are creating more and more content for the web, and much of it differs in character from what they publish on dead trees. Liberal and Conservative blogs are more self-explanatory; the hard-to-categorize sites included Drudge Report and The Moderate Voice. The Primary Sources were Gallup, Rasmussen and whitehouse.gov. If anybody cares, I can forward the list as I compiled it. It could probably use some revision, and I certainly reserve the right to have made a clerical error here or there.

I’ll leave you that to chew over for now. I’ll be back with answers when I have them, and with any luck, I will be back inside of a month with a few more thoughts about what all is going on here.

The CNN/Something Awful Debate

Published by William Beutler on August 17, 2007 in Academic Blogging, Asymmetrical Media, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, CNN, Debates, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Message Boards, Mike Gravel, New York Times, Seriously, Tech Blogosphere and YouTube. 8 Comments

Inspired by the recent CNN/YouTube debate, today’s New York Times asked several media observers to imagine other ways in which the Web 2.0 world might influence presidential politics. I found Matt Bai’s suggestion particularly interesting:

Maybe someday soon the candidates will have laptop computers at their lecterns, and we’ll hang a giant screen behind the stage. Then, as one candidate is talking, the others will use instant messaging to create a kind of scrolling commentary and critique, and all the comments will appear overhead. While John Edwards is decrying special interests, Bill Richardson might type: “Gee, John, what exactly would you call the trial lawyers?” Or Christopher Dodd might write: “Why is Kucinich still talking? LOL.”

It’s a neat idea. This year’s Personal Democracy Forum tried something similar, with audience members’ comments appearing on a screen behind the panelists. That worked all right, though it did distract from those onstage.

For a presidential debate then, the comments would indeed have to come from the candidates — not to mention, they need something to do while they wait five or ten minutes for their next turn.

And what if CNN teamed up with uber-message board Something Awful? Well, I believe it might look a little something like this:

Democratic Debate as co-sponsored by Something Awful

P.S. I also noticed that the Times titled Tom Brokaw’s contribution “Sip and Spin.” Now, I’m perfectly fine with potential presidents answering questions from snowmen, but if you know whence the phrase come — no, not the toy — well, isn’t that a little undignified?

Update: Something Awful has found this post. Of course, they don’t seem to care for it and even rescinded the initial link. But the poster did concede:

The picture is pretty much SA I guess.

And as you can see in the comments, this post has been blessed with one of the most sincere statements a latter-day message boarder can offer. Thanks, guys.

Updated again: Okay, the people on this SA board seemed to like it a bit more.