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Archive for the 'Beltway media' Category

McCain Salutes Russert, Obama Makes The Ask

Two e-mails landed in my Gmail inbox late last night, the first from the McCain campaign and the second from Obama’s team. Notice the order and the subject matter:

Gmail inbox: Russert vs. Obama store

In case your eyes are as bad as mine (or you aren’t using Firefox 3.0’s nifty zoom feature) how about we blow up the relevant detail of that image:

Detail of Russert vs. Obama store e-mails

So John McCain’s staff sends out a tribute (complete with video) to the too-soon late, great “Meet the Press” host and NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, and 45 minutes later, Barack Obama’s staff sends out a commercial solicitation. Remember the Titans vs. Buy More Stuff.

I’m reminded of WashingtonPost.com’s botched e-mail alert the morning Sean Taylor died, and just a tiny bit that recent Sunday e-mail from Newsweek that somehow managed to omit that edition’s only negative story about the Obama campaign. This one is a bit more esoteric — how many outside the Beltway are on both candidate’s e-mail lists?

Well, just about any reporter covering national politics. They matter, right? And unlike WPNI’s newspaper and magazine, the Obama camp at least has a rapid response team. I have no doubt this e-mail alert was prepared and schedulded well in advance of Friday afternoon’s terrible news. But because e-mail alerts can be timely, they must be timely. The Obama campaign must know this — after all, they beat all other presidential candidates with the first campaign e-mail of the New Year.

Would it have been so difficult to recycle a few of the candidate’s comments from earlier in the day? They needn’t even go as far as the McCain campaign did — the specially-recorded tribute video is a little more personal than McCain’s tarmac remarks early Friday afternoon, reflecting on the fact that he made 52 appearances on Russert’s “Meet”. [Update: As Sean Hackbarth notes in the comments, this was clearly something McCain himself wanted to do.]

Checking my inbox archives, I see this is the first time the Obama campaign has flogged its online store in an e-mail subject line since the last Christmas shopping season. But they have sent no e-mail acknowledging (let alone mourning) Russert’s untimely passing, and I can’t even find a release on the website. I know the Obama campaign is sort of running against insider Washington, but wasn’t Russert pretty much the best kind possible?

For anyone who bothered to open up those e-mails in succession last night or today, the juxtaposition looks like this:

McCain letter about Russert Obama store e-mail pitch

Especially when you consider that national political reporters who worked alongside or in competition with Russert are the most likely to have noticed this discrepancy, the advantage here goes to McCain.

P.S. The McCain e-mail could use more color and better design, but they should get credit for rendering the text in actual ASCII/Unicode characters.

P.P.S. A personal favorite “Meet the Press” episode was the morning of May 27, 2007, where Russert’s calm, methodical questioning laid bare Bill Richardson’s surprising inability to defend himself on almost anything, from the serious to the trivial. Russert managed to do gotcha without seeming gotcha, and the hour-long interrogation was one of his most effective. That was the real end of Gov. Richardson’s presidential campaign. The transcript is here.

The New Hotlineness

I’d been hearing the rumors for a few weeks but, finally, the new National Journal site design has had its debut. But on a Friday?

In Washington, bad news always gets released on Fridays. The idea is to bury it just as the week’s traditional news cycle is winding down — as reporters are racing to get out of, or heading out on the, town.

Is that what’s going on here? Here’s the page specific to The Hotline, so you be the judge:

The New Hotline website design on National Journal

It’s certainly much more modern than the National Journal website of old (see below right). You can’t tell from the screen shot, but there is just as much actual content on the page; it’s just been pushed below the fold. Now it resembles nothing so much as a wonkier version of Slate (which has had its own disastrous redesigns, not that I’m calling this one disastrous).

But that red is so neon it looks like it belongs on the cover of Wired, and for the moment it clashes badly with the colors of the sponsor’s advertisement.

Classic (Old) Hotline website designIt also looks odd next to the darker red, which is more representative of the colors used across the site. Indeed, click over to Congress Daily and National Journal (aka “The Magazine”) and you may think you’re losing your eyesight.

On the other hand, I count two links to my old online column/daily blog report, The Blogometer, apparently the only National Journal feature with two links on this particular page. That alone is enough to get a thumbs-up from me.

Well done, National Journal!

The Selling of the Snark

New Wonkette logoSo Nick Denton is selling/has sold/given away Wonkette, the third blog created as part of his Gawker Media blog network, which made Ana Marie Cox famous for DC and Jessica Cutler famous for fifteen people. But that was a long time ago.

Denton has parted ways with titles before, selling Oddjack and shutting down Sploid and Screenhead a few years back. This time he has found new homes for each of his websites. As of today, Wonkette belongs to managing editor Ken Layne. This is the second time Denton has put one of Layne’s blogs out to pasture; he was the sole editor of Sploid during its brief-ish run.

During Wonkette’s existence I have been an occasional reader and loyal critic. I am an approved commenter on the Gawker network, and every once in awhile I swing by to let them have it. Coincidentally, the most recent time was just last night.

Under Cox, I felt the blog leaned too far to the left while claiming to be non-partisan. Under subsequent editors I let go of that complaint and moved on to on the fact that it is simply not written for a Beltway audience. It breaks no news and advances no stories; it merely adds a garnish of cheap snark to the day’s headlines. Ana Marie Cox and Jessica Cutler, no longer with WonketteGawker matters to New York City (well, Manhattan at any rate) and Valleywag matters to the Silicon Valley (even if they hate it), but Wonkette offers no special insight on Hollywood for ugly people. Outside it’s America, which treats politics like entertainment. Here in the District, Defamer and Deadspin probably matter more, since we don’t want to talk shop after hours. But don’t take my word for it — check out the comments at DCist.

The last time Denton tried to make the site relevant to the actual District which it purports to cover, he moved Alex Pareene from New York to DC. Pareene was very funny (and still is on Gawker, for which he writes now) but these new kids — recent college student Jim Newell and total unknown Sara K. Smith — are bad Xerox copies. Fittingly, Layne doesn’t even live in Washington.

I take Denton entirely at his word in his explanation for selling it:

Why these three sites? To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did. … As for Wonkette: political advertisers are a strange breed; they don’t come through the same agencies our sales people deal with.

Nick Denton, no longer the owner of WonketteSo now Wonkette returns to Henry Copeland’s unique Blogads advertising network, which handles a great deal of political advertising (including Blog P.I., on the infrequent occasions that someone wants to do business with us) and is a much better fit than whatever agency handles Gawker’s advertising.

Ultimately, politics just isn’t where the money is. (Don’t think for a moment Mark Penn built that tunnel between his houses in Georgetown with campaign earnings.) But as others note, now is the time to cash out. Traffic is up, likely due to growing interest in the presidential election. And just as you don’t want to sell pumpkin futures the day after Halloween, the day before isn’t any good either. Better do it while your buyers still have some expectation of getting a return on their investment.