website statistics

Archive for the 'White House '08' Category

RNC08 #1: Don’t Call it a Comeback

Published by William Beutler on August 31, 2008 in #DNC08, #RNC08, 2008 Conventions, 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, 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.

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. Closed

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, Tough Crowd, Twitter, 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.

Googling the Conventions

Published by William Beutler on July 14, 2008 in 2008 Conventions, Advertising, Democrats, Google, Republicans, White House '08 and William Beutler. 1 Comment

The Google Adwords “buy your rivals” strategy can be a very effective way of putting your message in front of Internet users who wouldn’t necessarily think about your brand, product, service, candidate, issue, argument, party, or even your party’s nominating convention.

So let’s try Googling the major party political conventions. First up, the least interesting result, searching republican convention:

Google results for Republican Convention

As we can see, the RNC already has the top organic search result, the one that says Republican National Convention 2008 – September 1-4, 2008.” And yet they have also bought the top paid search result, the one against the light yellow background, which might seem like a poor investment. But maybe not, as we’ll see when we Google democratic convention:

Google results for Democratic Convention

It may have pained some in the GOP to put money down for the “ic” version of this word, but at least they have the satisfaction of having the absolute top search result on this page. While Republicans are generally considered to trail Democrats online in organization, infrastructure and overall support, here we can see that someone at the RNC (presumably under the direction of Cyrus Krohn) is thinking about how to overcome this disadvantage. And speaking of disadvantages, let’s see what happens when we drop the “ic” and search for democrat convention:

Google results for Democrat Convention

Now that is most certainly a good investment. It may pain the Democrats to compete, let alone pay money, for the (often) grammatically incorrect non-”ic” variation on their party’s name, but then Google searches don’t necessarily have to be grammatical to be useful. If the DNC or the convention committee have money in the budget — and this may be part of the problem — they’d be smart to get on that ASAP.

Brief Interviews with Mike Murphy

Published by William Beutler on July 11, 2008 in John McCain, Journalism, Literature, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

For no reasons other than my own demonstrated affinity for the works of David Foster Wallace and recent fixation with the alleged pseudonymous works of Mike Murphy, I would like to present an excerpt of a limited panel strip drawn in 2005 by webcomic artist Mike Russell1.

The following is based on one brief passage from “Up, Simba!”, Wallace’s not-so-brief 2000 Rolling Stone article about his time aboard the Straight Talk Express with the “anti-candidate” and the traveling press corps, recently republished as a short book with the dreadful title “McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope”2:

Mike Murphy and John McCain star in an unauthorized comic strip based on David Foster Wallace’s “Up, Simba!”

  1. Oh, all right. As long as I’m talking about Wallace, you’ll have to excuse the use of footnotes. Anyway, I asked Russell if I could use this, and he pointed out that because he drew it on spec using copyrighted material, he couldn’t actually make any money off it, so I was free to “go nuts” with it. However, he did want the point made clear that he is “totally unaffiliated” with Wallace or any publishers of the text wherefrom he derived the above-printed comic excerpt. And I’m happy to do so.
  2. Thing is, most of Wallace’s titles are far better than his editors’. For a (very long (and very funny)) comic essay about a week on board a luxury cruise, which of the following sounds like a better title: “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” or “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise”? Yet the latter is what Harper’s called it, and the former is what Wallace was able to call it once he published the full-length version (approx. 100 pages) in his eponymous (the essay, not his name) first collection of nonfiction.
  3. I don’t actually have a third item, and there’s no corresponding third footnote above, I just thought w/r/t footnotes, three would be a nice round number.

Open Left and MyDD, One Year Later

Published by William Beutler on July 11, 2008 in Barack Obama, Charts and Graphs, Hillary Clinton, Netroots, Site Traffic, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

This week marks the one-year anniversary for Open Left, a spinoff of the original netroots blog, MyDD. As far as I can tell, the date was not observed on the site itself, but then Chris Bowers, Matt Stoller and the rest are busy running a political website. Blog P.I. though is pretty much just about political websites, so I thought it would be interesting to compare Open Left with MyDD, and see how the two sites have fared in the year since they went in different directions. Via Compete:

Open Left and MyDD site traffic comparison via Compete.com

Here’s how I’m reading this: Open Left had a strong first two months, rising quickly to match the long-running MyDD in overall traffic. Yet MyDD’s traffic was only slightly affected, if at all. How could this be? Naturally, site traffic isn’t a zero sum game, and it’s probable that a reader of one is a reader of both. But it took Open Left a bit of time to pick up readers, while I’ve long been of the belief that as long as MyDD adequately covers its subject matter, Democratic campaign and Hill staffers will never remove it from their bookmarks.

Then MyDD achieved some separation in the fall, which initially I’d attribute to growing interest in the presidential contest. One of the main reasons Bowers and Stoller left was to focus on the progressive movement writ large, rather than the horse race — so it is understandable that it would not be the go-to site in the heat of the primaries. And then starting in December, MyDD really began to take off. While some of this is probably attributable to still more interest in the nominating contest, I’d wager the sharp spike owes to site founder Jerome Armstrong (along with Bowers/Stoller replacement Todd Beeton) taking the site in a strong pro-Clinton direction. This distinguished it from most lefty blogs, which ranged from avidly pro-Obama to mildly pro-Obama (as I’ve discussed before, Open Left was at best tepidly pro-Obama).

Odd, then, that interest peaked in late January/early February, as the nominating contest was only just getting under way. Open Left suffered a drop in traffic around this time as well, suggesting a broader trend. Traffic slowing just when things got interesting? Maybe it is more interesting to the outside observer, where the same thing is frustrating to partisans who expected to have a nominee. And then as Obama inched closer to the nomination, the interest of Clinton supporters remained flat, while the leftosphere overall turned to matters of organization rather than elections. This part, I concede, is the most speculative; I admit to being a little baffled by this section of the chart.

And now? Well, the last month shows another slip in traffic for both, with MyDD staying slightly ahead. I wouldn’t be surprised if this continued for another month. August is slow in politics, even in election years, and even in the blogosphere.

But it seems clear that despite being an expansion team, Open Left is in the same league as MyDD. Then again, it seems no matter how big you get, there’s always someone bigger than you:

Firedoglake, bigger than MyDD and Open Left, via Compete.com

Richelieu in Repose

Published by William Beutler on July 7, 2008 in Blogging Officials, Brick-and-mortar consultants, John McCain, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

In today’s New York Times, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol asks:

So Where’s Murphy?

That is to say, why has former McCain strategist Mike Murphy not yet joined John McCain’s presidential campaign? Because Kristol is talking about it, it seems like everyone else is talking about it, but nobody is talking about where Murphy has been recently.

Or where he may very well have been. That would be the Weekly Standard’s blog, where a pseudonymous contributor named Richelieu is thought to be Murphy by several writers in a position to know (or at least fairly suspect) that this is so.

This makes it all the weirder for Dean Barnett, also of the Weekly Standard, to write today at the very same blog:

In the New York Times today, Bill Kristol speculates that Mike Murphy may be about to ride in on his white steed to save the McCain campaign from itself. Maybe he’s right.

Looking through the archives, it turns out that Richelieu has not contributed a post since late June. After several months (since October 2007) of frequent posting, Richelieu’s output slowed to a crawl in mid-May and had nearly ceased altogether by early June.

Mid-May was also about the time where Obama’s nomination finally appeared to be inevitable, and early June was when Sen. Clinton finally dropped out. So did Murphy hang up his pen name just in time to be available to offer his services to McCain? It looks like we just may find out.

Update: Apparently not? Mike Murphy has signed a deal with NBC.

Portrait of the Smear Artists as an Old Boys’ Club

Published by William Beutler on July 3, 2008 in #pdf2008, Barack Obama, Charts and Graphs, Online Campaigns, Tech Blogosphere, Urban Legends, Web 2.0, Website Design, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

Example of Obama’s Fight the Smears pageIt’s been a few weeks since Barack Obama’s presidential campaign unveiled its much-discussed Fight the Smears microsite. It’s certainly a daring move, and probably the right one. Although a cardinal rule of politics has long been “don’t repeat the charges against you,” there does reach a point where that no longer holds. John Kerry learned this the hard way, and Obama should get credit for adjusting accordingly.

One aspect I haven’t seen discussed in any great detail is the second page of the website, “Behind the Smears”. It’s not easily found — although it occupies the somewhat prominent last spot in the list of links at left, it’s also buried at the bottom of the page, below the main content and just above the site disclaimers.

The main content of said page is a chart showing the relationships between the accusers, and it looks like this:

Network of Obama “smears”

It’s pretty neat, but it’s also under-designed. After all, it seems to claim that the 1992 Clinton campaign itself is is smearing him, when all it means is that… actually, I’m not sure what it’s saying. What’s more, the lines are too light and don’t convey any specific information about how they are connected. There are a few small revisions which would make it more intuitive: a dotted line for lesser connections, or bigger names for those with more influence.

Relationship mapping is becoming a bigger deal in the blogosphere as more rigorous and even scholarly studies are done about the connections between blogs and attempts are made to quantify the influence one has upon another. This is driven in part by curiosity and in part by my own industry, where marketers are desperate to accurately quantify their impact. One example comes from Linkfluence, as demoed at Personal Democracy Forum this year:

Political blog map via Linkfluence

But how useful is this information? It’s nice to see a representation of the political ’sphere at the macro level. Some insights can certainly be derived therefrom, but it leaves a lot unsaid. For example, it doesn’t necessarily help me to know that one site has linked to another. I need to know why. I need to be able to drill down, and find out how they are arranged by a common link or keyword.

Don’t get me wrong, though: I’m all for pretty pictures.

And while the Obama campaign chart isn’t all that pretty and ultimately not that informative, it’s nevertheless a step in the right direction. The more and better tools a campaign can give to its online supporters, the more investment (in time as well as money) they are likely to make in turn.