Rory O'Connor2013-05-22T16:16:04-04:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.news.moviefone.com/author/index.php?author=rory-oconnorCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Rory O'ConnorGood old fashioned elbow grease.Re-imagining Journalism in The Wired Citytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31456412013-04-24T17:05:48-04:002013-04-24T17:01:06-04:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/blogger and professor Dan Kennedy has long been one of the go-to guys in the ever-burgeoning field of media criticism. He's an author as well -- and his new book The Wired City asks, and answers, an important question: Does the digital information revolution presage the end of news, or simply the end of newspapers?
It's a question other authors have been raising lately as well, from Nicco Mele in The End of Big to Bob McChesney in Digital Disconnect, both of whom offer analysis of the interplay between journalism and democracy and make valuable points about the need for stronger institutional reactions to our current crisis of media and democracy while forecasting a dystopic future for journalists and journalistic institutions.
And why not? As Kennedy himself points out in an introduction entitled "Apocalypse or Something Like It," by the end of this century's first decade, "it looked like the collapse of the newspaper business that media observers had been predicting for years was finally coming true." After all, more than 40,000 newspaper jobs were being lost in a single year; paid circulation was plummeting; advertising revenue was in free fall; and dozens of dailies had simply given up the ghost. Happily, however, unlike Mele or McChesney, Kennedy finds reason for optimism, and his well-researched and informative look at one small not-for-profit new journalistic enterprise, an online-only neighborhood-oriented news site in Connecticut called the New Haven Independent, offers ample hope for an uncertain future.
Kennedy is a veteran professional journalist, and perhaps that is why he begins by asking the right question: "Since the rise of the commercial Web in the mid 1990s, the question for professional journalists has been: Who shall pay?" With the bottom fallen out of the advertising that once subsidized most journalism, and with readers under the misguided impression that "information wants to be free" and that they no longer have to pay anything for it, Kennedy investigates a promising "third possibility -- namely, neither advertisers nor readers but someone else: community leaders and foundation executives who care about journalism and its role in a democratic society, and who are willing to subsidize it for the benefit of themselves and others."
The decision to examine this third way through an intensely hyperlocal lens is a smart one; not only does the approach mirror that of its subject, but it allows Kennedy to zero in on specific details that, taken together, limn a much larger story. He explores his overall theme in pointillistic fashion, telling a complex but compelling story by illustrating it throughout with interesting anecdotes and characters -- many of them local heroes such as Independent founder Paul Bass -- and concludes that they may have found "not the answer to the question of where we will find quality local journalism in the post-newspaper age" but, at the least, "an answer."
Kennedy is always careful not to claim too much, forthrightly admitting, for example, that "If the rise of nonprofit community news sites is a heartening development, it is also a very small one - especially in comparison to the resources that have vanished from traditional, for-profit journalism." And it's true that the numbers seem daunting; he notes for example how, between 2006 and 2009 alone, "newspapers cut their newsroom budgets by an estimated $1.6 billion each year, for a total of a quarter of their spending on journalism." With both journalism budgets and journalists themselves facing the axe, the question "Who shall pay?" indeed looms large.
Although he could have looked elsewhere in his quest to learn more about the "someone else" model of funding journalism -- and he briefly does examine other local news sites, such as the Batavian, the Voice of San Diego, Baristanet and others -- choosing the story of the Independent and its charismatic founder, editor and publisher Paul Bass, a white, Yale-educated, Conservative Jew, helps ground the story in a gritty, inner city reality that feels right. The details of how Bass stays in business year after year, his fears that one day he might not ("I'm always worried that I'm not going to be employed in a year," Bass admits. "I'm scared I'm not going to make it to retirement.") and how he interacts and sometimes collides with New Haven's disenfranchised majority of African American and Latino citizens show both the promise and the limits of the "someone else" model.
No book is without its flaws, of course, and The Wired City has its own. In particular, Kennedy is too easy on the lame explanation Bass offers for not having a single person of color on his reporting staff -- Bass says he "simply hired people he knew were good and who sought him out." But Kennedy partially makes up for this lapse by quoting one African-American community leader's smart observation, "It's as if you are writing my story right now. It would be better if I wrote my story." In any event, it should come as no surprise that Bass's white reporter says he is greeted with suspicion in the black community, feels "slightly nervous" when covering it, or that teenagers yell "You're in the wrong neighborhood, boy!" when he does...
Still, when we as a democratic society are at what Kennedy accurately calls, "a historical moment when nonprofit media -- supported by foundations, donations, and, indirectly, taxpayers, since contributions are tax-deductible -- are in many cases more stable than for-profit media," his book offers a valuable window into one possible future. It is, as he says, happily a future of "professional news organizations run by paid journalists," but one that has "built into it DNA" a deeper, better and fundamentally different relationship with audiences. One result, Kennedy concludes, is that "journalism, if not newspapers, is already being saved -- not everywhere, and not perfectly. But in city after city, region by region, dedicated visionaries are moving beyond the traditional model of print newspapers supported by advertising."
"May you live in interesting times," as the old Irish adage -- or curse -- has it, and so we journalists do. The next few decades, says Kennedy, "are likely to be as exciting a time for journalism" as we have seen in centuries. But fear not. "What we are living through now is not the death of journalism," he says, "But, rather, the uncertain and sometimes painful early stages of rebirth." Researching his book, Kennedy concludes, "left me profoundly optimistic about the future of journalism." Reading it will do the same for you.]]>Independent Media Goes Mainstreamtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30527632013-04-11T13:44:22-04:002013-04-11T13:44:30-04:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/
If the thousands of attendees from every state in the U.S. and dozens of other countries at the recently concluded National Conference for Media Reform -- the nation's largest event devoted to issues of media, technology and democracy -- didn't grab your attention, consider the following:
• Mother Jones magazine just scored its second major scoop involving a secret recording of a top political leader, which revealed that the team seeking to reelect Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who leads his party in the Senate, was preparing tough personal attacks against possible opponents, including actor Ashley Judd -- who perhaps as a result has since declared she won't run.
• This followed of course on the heels of MoJo's previous unearthing of a secret recording of Mitt Romney's now-infamous "47 percent" remarks, which in addition to ensuring Romney's defeat, earned the magazine and reporter David Corn deserved mainstream kudos such as a prestigious George Polk Award.
• Mother Jones also earned a recent National Magazine Award nomination -- along with such other "alternative" publications as The Nation, Orion, The Texas Observer and the Nation Institute -- for scrappy and sophisticated journalism that further demonstrates how the independent media is now filling the vacuum left by the decline of the prevously established Fourth Estate. In addition to the Romney story, another good example is this joint Texas Observer/Nation Investigative Fund piece about the drug war in Mexico's Juarez Valley.
• Meanwhile Colorlines, published by the Applied Research Center, recently won its three-year campaign to get the Associated Press to stop using the offensive term "illegal immigrant" to describe what the AP now rightly terms "people living in a country illegally."
Unsurprisingly, this rise in the clout and importance of the independent media sector, as evidenced by the above, has thus far been ignored by the mainstream media it is busy supplanting. But the prestigious journal the Chronicle of Philantropy recently took notice with an instructive analysis of what it called a '"powerful nonprofit partnership," written by Vincent Stehle, the executive director of an organization of grant makers called Media Impact Funders.
Stehle focused his attention on the "failure of American journalism" dating back to the beginning of the Iraq War, when as he rightly notes, "most major news organizations reported the buildup toward war without adequate skepticism or scrutiny." The independent press, however, "wasn't taken in by the Bush administration's marketing and manipulations." As a result, says Stehle, "even as most of the journalism world struggles to be heard, the nonprofits are having more influence than ever, as they collaborate to raise vital issues like war and peace and wealth and poverty in ways that reflect the public interest."
As the adage goes, it's an ill wind that blows no good, and something good has arisen out of the ashes of the Bush Administration's evil and misguided bellicosity -- the reinvigoration of the progressive press. This process "got its start when magazines like The Nation, The American Prospect and Mother Jones questioned accounts of weapons inspectors that called the administration's assertions into question," notes Stehle. "And independent nonprofit broadcasters like Democracy Now, Free Speech TV, and Link TV, gave voice to the widespread opposition of political leaders in most nations and millions of protesters in the streets of America and around the world."
Those independent outlets (including, full disclosure, my media firm Globalvision) are now joined as members of the Media Consortium, a network of more than 60 media organizations, most of which are nonprofit or for-profit businesses focused on a social mission. As Stehle rightly posits, in the face of the many failures, cutbacks, buyouts and layoffs afflicting the mainstream media in the past decade, "no group of journalistic organizations has been more dedicated or effective" than the Consortium.
How did it happen? "In March 2005, reeling from an election that failed to reflect the disastrous consequences of the war abroad and the increasing problem of income inequality at home, more than two dozen leaders of nonprofit press organizations came together to explore ways they might work together" Stehle recounts. "In part, they were looking for ways to run their businesses more effectively through cooperative practices. But more far-reaching, they wanted to work together to harness public attention to the major policy debates of our time by raising issues of economic justice, human rights, and progressive perspectives in national-security debates." To do so, we agreed to form a collaborative organization that would "help increase the voice of independent journalism in broader public debates.
Less than a decade later, those same progressive and independent media organizations ("put simply, these are the people who made the terms 47 percent and 99 percent household terms," Stehle explains) are now having a growing impact on both the overall media landscape and our nation's politics. Their work is so powerful, in fact, that such luminaries as André Schiffrin, longtime publisher of Pantheon Books and founder of the New Press, have stated outright that the independents -- once dismissed and loudly reviled as marginal, leftist and naïve --"are now playing the classic role of fourth estate in our democracy."
So why haven't you read anything about this sea-change elsewhere in the media? Draw your own conclusions -- and remember you read it here first!]]>Digital Dystopiatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28531962013-03-12T10:09:05-04:002013-05-12T05:12:01-04:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/irresponsible -- oh hell, call me a cyber-utopian, throw in celebrant -- but it's undeniably true that I regard the admittedly messy, chaotic, confusing and upsetting digital information revolution as, on balance, a good thing, particularly when it comes to issues of democracy and power. After all, as noted in a recent book on the subject, one result of that revolution has been that "new methods of creating content and new channels to distribute it have become available to everyone and between everyone." As networked technologies proliferate, they rapidly transform "our political, commercial and communications environments" -- including "the very nature of our democracy itself."
Sounds good, don't you think? But two new books about the effects and implications of that ongoing and all-encompassing revolution -- especially with regard to the role of journalistic institutions -- suggest such optimism is increasingly obsolete. Instead, the authors believe, a scary digital dystopia awaits us.
The End of Big, by Internet pioneer Nicco Mele, is about the nature of power in the digital age, and has as its thesis that the radical connectivity of the new information revolution -- "our breathtaking ability to send vast amounts of data instantly, constantly and globally"-- is upsetting traditional big institutions and empowering upstarts. It is "toxic to conventional power structures" such as Big Media, Big Business, Big Government, Big Education, etc, and ipso facto, "the end of big is at hand."
One might think this power shift presents us with what Mele describes as "unprecedented opportunities to reshape our future for the better." But unfortunately, he says, we may rather be "doomed to a future inconsistent with the hard-won democratic values on which our modern society is based... a chaotic, uncontrollable, and potentially even catastrophic future."
Although he concedes that many traditional institutions are flawed and corrupt, and says "they deserve to die," Mele is more concerned about what he calls the "destructive consequences" of radical connectivity, which puts "unprecedented power in the hands of every individual." At first glance this may seem to be "potentially a good thing," but Mele warns, "radical connectivity is altering the exercise of power faster than we can understand it." The consequences are "disruptive, confusing, even dangerous."
Why? "Without realizing it, citizens and elected leaders have abdicated control over our political and economic destinies to a small band of nerds like myself," explains Mele. This "revenge of the nerds" scenario worries him because he fears that technology is outstripping the ability of our institutions to keep pace with it.
The End of Big makes big claims -- sometimes too big. In trying to support an overarching premise, Mele sometimes overreaches; describing what is at stake as "nothing less than the continued progress of the human race" or claiming that the "end of big in business represents one of the greatest hopes for saving our civilization" detracts from his otherwise cogent analysis. Another problem with his "end of big" metaphor is the problem of how to account for the "bigger than big" new tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple -- which briefly became the world's largest company last year when it passed Exxon in market capitalization until the oil giant regained its premier status a few months ago.
But the biggest flaw in The End of Big may be simply that Mele takes on too much. He offers too many examples from too many sectors, such as Big Media, Big Politics, Big Brands, Big Government, etc. -- many of which have already been considered elsewhere. Mele may have profited instead by biting off far less and chewing more just on technology, education, government and politics, areas where he has ample top-flight, real-world experience and is most insightful. If his book's focus had been narrower -- dare I say smaller? -- he could have drilled deeper as well.
Like Mele, media reformer and scholar Robert W. McChesney fears for the fate of our democracy at the hands of the digital revolution. His new book, Digital Disconnect, also offers some helpful history and a clear, useful analysis, but it too suffers from large claims and sweeping arguments in service of a thesis.
McChesney's concern, per his subtitle, is that "Capitalism is turning the Internet against democracy," and that its "colonization of cyberspace has... made the Internet a disturbingly antidemocratic force." He splits the world of Internet writers into two opposing camps: celebrants and skeptics, bringing to mind earlier divisions between supposed "cyber-utopians" and such self-satisfied "cyber-realists" as Evgeny Morozov and Malcolm Gladwell - who like to deride their opponents as "digital evangelists."
But McChesney finds both camps wanting. Instead, he proposes "to take the best of what each side has to offer and make it part of a far more serious discussion" of democracy and its discontents, which he sees as having been so undermined that "one could logically wish the computer had never been invented."
To McChesney, the celebrants, (which include the likes of Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis and, full disclosure, myself) naively see the Internet as a force for democracy and good worldwide, ending monopolies of information and centralized control over communication." He even quotes from my book Friends, Followers and the Future: "Watch out, Big Media, Big Business, and Big Government - here come our friends, our followers, and out future!" and adds, per Jeff Jarvis, "Resistance is futile."
Other so-called skeptics, including the likes of Jaron Lanier and Eli Pariser, have previously pointed out that technology is as capable of being destructive as it is progressive. Echoing the concerns of Nicco Mele, McChesney approvingly quotes one dystopian thinker, Virginia Eubanks, author of Digital Dead End, as saying "many of us... have engaged in a massive, collective, consensual hallucination about the power of technology" and another, Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, as fearing "something very important to being human is being lost."
Both celebrants and skeptics share "a single, deep and often fatal flaw," McChesney believes -- "ignorance about capitalism and how it works." The naive and ignorant celebrants, he says, "often believe digital technology has superpowers over political economy." But anyone who wants "to make big claims about how the digital revolution is fundamentally invigorating democracy...must start from a stronger foundation." His proposed solution? The application of "political economy -- an understanding of capitalism and its relationship to democracy," which McChesney says, "should be the "organizing principle for evaluating the digital revolution."
Like Mele, McChesney spends a good deal of time analyzing the interplay between journalism and democracy. He says that "it is of singular importance in democracies." And like Mele, he worries about the collapse of institutions and the effect on journalism and democracy. But neither is an experienced journalist, and both their analyses suffer from a lack of actual practice in that field.
Mele, for example, extols journalism's "historic role as guardian of the public interest" and says "we need to keep the iron core of journalism vibrant and strong." McChesney, for his part, cites the "glory days of Sixties journalism... the high-water mark for professional journalism" and summarily dismisses most other analyses as "vacuous because of the lack of a political economic critique of journalism."
But both authors fail to offer a truly professional critique of journalism. Each bemoans the passing of the supposed "glory days" of investigative reporting, and is too believing in and reliant on a remembrance of a halcyon era in media and political history that simply never existed. In my experience, which includes several stints as an investigative reporter, such journalistic activity was never popular or much supported by bosses or owners, since it is by definition costly, time-consuming and uncertain in outcome, with no guarantee of success. And even if you do deliver the goods as an investigative journalist, the odds remain high that your reporting will inevitably alienate someone powerful, such as advertisers or the politically well-connected. So no, investigative reporting was never a top priority for journalistic institutions in my experience -- even back in the so-called glory days!
McChesney's book also suffers from a plague of sweeping over-statements. Cavalierly mentioning the "fact" that both the Democratic and Republican parties are "effectively owned by communications corporations" or claiming that "what is emerging veers toward a classic definition of fascism" only undercuts his larger and more salient criticisms.
Still, both Mele and McChesney make valuable points about the need for stronger institutional reactions to our current crisis of media and democracy, and both their books are well worth the read. As McChesney accurately concludes, "the Internet is not the cause of journalism's problems." Like Mele, he believes it is up to us to imagine and build" institutions that will save it. His approach to doing so, however, is to recommend that since journalism is a public good, it receive large public investments in the future -- a view he also espoused in earlier works such as The Death and Life of American Journalism.
But as much as I might favor obtaining more resources for both institutions and journalists themselves (especially his call for "living wages for reporters") I don't see billions of dollars in public subsidies flowing my way any time soon, any more than I do free beer and ice cream....
Instead, I think we must, ironically, look instead to the Internet itself, in all its destabilizing and disruptive glory, to deliver a new and improved journalism. Both Mele and McChesney admit the possibility that, as McChesney puts it, "the Internet could provide the basis for a radically improved democratic journalism." After all, as he also writes, "The Internet is the ultimate public good... and is profoundly disposed toward democracy." Like McChesney, Mele ends on a promising note, saying that although "at first glance, The End of Big does seem dark, maybe even apocalyptic," the future "will belong to those who gaze beyond the chaos of the End of Big, glimpsing one last big that stands unscathed" Big Opportunity."
So why all the naysaying and doomsday predictions? The digital information revolution has already greatly democratized media and commerce. Why can't it next democratize democracy itself?]]>Zero Dark Thirty Wins Oscar for Most Controversialtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27417822013-02-22T17:11:22-05:002013-04-24T05:12:01-04:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/Zero Dark Thirty promises to win the prize as this year's most controversial film. Everyone from leftie filmmakers like Michael Moore and Alex Gibney to organizations as disparate as Amnesty International and the CIA have already weighed in on the Spies-and-Special Ops-glorifying film -- and particularly about its apparently positive spin on the supposed efficacy of torture.
Self-described "lowly movie critic" Tom Carson offered his admittedly inexpert political analysis, ("I can't believe anyone with half a brain could watch ZD30 and think the movie is hailing torture.") while expert political analysts such as Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald -- after confessing that they hadn't seen the film -- nevertheless waded into the discussion.
So too New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, New Yorker writers Jane Mayer and Dexter Filkins, and myriad others, who have pointed out that the treatment of torture in the film "appears to have strayed from real life," as Filkins too delicately puts it.
Meanwhile the filmmakers themselves, director Kathryn Bigelow and producer/screenwriter Mark Boal, were everywhere at once -- on ABC Nightline, PBS Charlie Rose, at Writers Guild screenings, etc. -- consistently extolling their film's journalistic credentials and the supposed fact that it is is "fact-filled." But when asked about whether their "fact-filled" film in fact "strayed from real life," the filmmakers regularly retreated into the comfortably familiar "this is not a documentary" response.
Both Boal and Bigelow seem intent on shoving aside the true facts about torture's effectiveness. All Boal would offer when I queried him on the subject recently was the pallid response that the issue was "politically controversial, as you know."
Instead of my offering yet another critique of the film or analysis of its pro-torture message, however, let's look at what the filmmakers themselves say about ZD30. Here is Bigelow writing in the LA Times about the " brouhaha that surrounded the film... when many thoughtful people were characterizing it in wildly contradictory ways."
After first assuring us that she is "a lifelong pacifist" who supports "all protests against the use of torture, and, quite simply, inhumane treatment of any kind," Bigelow next claims that "[e]xperts disagree sharply on the facts and particulars of the intelligence hunt" and adds, "As for what I personally believe, which has been the subject of inquiries, accusations and speculation, I think Osama bin Laden was found due to ingenious detective work. Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn't mean it was the key to finding Bin Laden."
Still intent on having her cake and eating too, she goes on to note that "bin Laden... was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines..." As blogger Greg Mitchel later noted, however:
"What she doesn't own up to is that her "depiction" of the usefulness of torture in the film is likely not based on facts -- and, in fact, the film endorses the view that torture was crucial in helping to get bin Laden. (See a brief clip from key scene here, for example.) In the op-ed, she admits that she and screenwriter Mark Boal chose to accept the disputed view that torture did play a role in nailing bin Laden. So much for the claims of her defenders who state that her film does no such thing."
Bigelow's confusion is even more apparent in an introduction she wrote for the shooting script of Boal's screenplay. In it she extols him for "creating a new genre, one that tells a truthful story in searing scenes, based on bona fide reporting... "
So once again, their "non-documentary" is said nonetheless to tell a "truthful story... based on bona fide reporting."
Nothing could be further from the truth!
Bigelow also noted, rightly this time, that "the material also raised deep moral questions about the lines that were crossed in the war on terror, and the nature of courage and persistence in a world where the normal rules don't seem to apply." That seems to me to be a much more truthful -- and fact-filled -- description of her and Boal's film. And here's something else I agree with the filmmakers on: "With this screenplay we could perhaps spark a conversation about the shadowy lives of those in the intelligence community, the price they've paid for their work, and the murky deeds that were done over this dark decade in the name of national security."
Murky deeds, indeed -- although you would never know it from looking at her film. As Bigelow concludes, "That feels to me like a film worth making, and a conversation worth having, now more than ever."
Well, she didn't really make that film -- but let's have that conversation now, by all means!]]>Welcome to America, Al Jazeeratag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24025452013-01-03T11:02:41-05:002013-03-05T05:12:01-05:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/"terror network" and propaganda organ. It's been denounced by publicity-seeking politicians for airing messages from Al Qaeda. Its reporters have been imprisoned in the Guantanamo gulag for years before being released after having never been tried or convicted of any terrorist ties. Others have been targeted by U.S. forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq, shot at, had missiles fired at them, and even killed.
As a result -- despite longstanding lobbying and advertising campaigns by Al Jazeera -- most major cable and satellite television networks in the U.S. have refused to offer its English-language service to their audiences ever since its inception six years ago. Instead, it's clearly been blacklisted and made almost impossible to find on America's airwaves.
Now, in the most American of solutions, the pan-Arab news leader has gone ahead and simply bought its seat at the media table. As Brian Stelter reported in the New York Times, "Al Jazeera... announced a deal to take over Current TV, the low-rated cable channel that was founded by Al Gore, a former vice president, and his business partners seven years ago." For the relatively small sum of $500 million dollars (at least as measured by its oil-rich owner in Qatar) Al Jaz has just purchased entree into more than 40 million cable-ready living rooms across the U.S.
Political concerns aside, some media observers have questioned whether Al Jazeera has, as Stelter phrased it, "The journalistic muscle and the money to compete head-to-head with CNN and other news channels in the United States." What a joke! The last time I checked, Sheikj Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the ruler of Qatar, had more money than Allah. And really, how much "journalistic muscle" does one need to compete with CNN these days -- not to mention the braying heads of such opinionated and politicized putative "news channels" as Fox or MSNBC? Judging from their most recent efforts -- such as completely misreporting the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare, for example -- what little journalism is being practiced at outlets such as CNN and Fox these days is, shall we say, far from muscular!
Is it any wonder that "the television sets of White House officials and lawmakers were tuned to the channel during the Arab Spring?" Inquiring minds want to know, after all! Meanwhile, "ordinary" citizens like you and me had to search out a live stream on the Internet if we wanted to be informed.
And Current, which began around the same time as Al Jazeera English, is no great loss. After years of stumbling, "nobody's watching," as Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced politician and failed CNN talker who is one of Current's current program hosts, recently confessed to reporters.
Well, almost no one, Mr. Spitzer... Actually, according to the Nielsen ratings service, on a typical night last year some 42,000 people tuned in to the network's shows.
Rather than distributing its excellent already-existing English-language channel, Al Jazeera plans instead to create something brand new. Al Jazeera America will based in New York, and about two thirds of it will be originally produced domestically, with the rest coming from AJE, which already has bureaus in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago.
Will AJA focus on offering another perspective to America's abysmal domestic news sources, in the mode of Russia Today or the BBC World News, now available in 25 million U.S. homes after a recent deal with Time Warner Cable? Will it try to fill the gap in international news instead? Will it attempt to do both?
It's still way too early to tell. For now, it's enough simply to be able to say, at long last, "Welcome to America, Al Jazeera!"]]>Carnage and Courage in the Home of the Bravetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23157252012-12-17T10:27:17-05:002013-02-16T05:12:01-05:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/
In the aftermath of the death of twenty schoolchildren, ultimately facilitated if not actually caused by our collective and cowardly inaction, the words of Francis Scott Key's stirring ode took on new significance. Written nearly two centuries ago, during the War of 1812, those poetic words were inspired after Key had been forced by the British enemy to witness the overnight bombardment of American forces at Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore. At dawn the next morning, upon seeing an American flag still flying over the fort, Key wrote a poem called "Defence of Fort McHenry," which he intended to accompany music from an already-popular tune composed by John Stafford Smith. Now known as "The Star-Spangled Banner," the song was adopted as America's national anthem first by executive order from Woodrow Wilson in 1916, and then more formally fifteen years later by a Congressional resolution signed by Herbert Hoover.
Since then the anthem has become an opening staple at sporting events of all kinds. We've all heard it sung countless times -- but how many of us have ever really listened to Scott's words? The anthem is not so much about a battle that has happened, as many suppose -- but instead the many battles yet to come. How many are aware that, far from looking back, Key was questioning the future, challenging us to maintain our freedom and to emulate the bravery of the forces under attack at Fort McHenry?
Key asks us hard, pointed, future-oriented questions: Can we still see "what so proudly we hailed" -- our flag and all it symbolizes? Does it still wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Today, sadly, the answer is evident -- it does not. Instead of tilting toward the courage to act, we and our supposed "leaders" have retreated into cynicism and fear. We have responded to repeated gun horror with cold and political calculation, bowing eternally to special interest and irrational ideology. Our democratic "shitstem" is apparently so infested with money collected by pusillanimous politicians for the purpose of perpetuating their power that necessary change seems impossible.
Both President Obama and his Republican opponent Mitt Romney were asked pointblank about gun control and assault weapons at the presidential debate here in New York. Neither would even engage the questioner in any real manner. Instead they each skirted the entire issue for fear of creating controversy and losing votes. Meanwhile our citizens get slaughtered with astonishing regularity.
None of us is exempt from the guilt -- or the responsibility for what happened at Newtown. What, frankly, have I ever done to make this intolerable situation any better? For that matter, what have you done? And President Obama -- what about you?
We already know you are good at talking, Mr. President, so you don't need to convince us anymore. Your speech at the memorial service for the children was typically eloquent. "Are we really prepared to sat we are powerless in the face of such carnage?" you asked. "Are we prepared to say that such violence visited upon our children year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?" But will you now, at long last, move beyond mere speech to take action?
We don't just need an Orator-in-Chief or a Mourner-in-Chief. We need you to lead us, to do something to stop the senseless killing... Take a risk! Spend some of the political "capital" you have earned. After all, you never have to run for office again...and you can't take it with you...so what do you have to lose? As you have said about protecting our children, "If we don't get that right, we don't get any of it right."
So please Mr. President, show us some courage and tell us -- have we kept our freedom? Does that tattered, star-spangled banner still wave over "the home of the brave?"]]>Why Progressives Should Love Right-Wing Mediatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.20933612012-11-08T13:50:02-05:002013-01-08T05:12:01-05:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/
Think about it for a moment. Without Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report, conservative bloggers like Erick Erickson and the rest of the self-insulating, self-inoculating and obviously self-deluding right wing media echo chamber, there's just no way Barack Obama could have pulled himself off the ropes and back into the victor's circle.
Without the wacky hacks and their irrational attacks, it's highly likely Mitt Romney and his cohorts would be celebrating instead today -- and that the Senate would have swung Republican as well. After all, as columnist Nicholas Kristof put it in the New York Times, "This was one that the Republicans really should have won."
Heresy? Hardly! As Kristof accurately noted, "Given the weak economy, American voters were open to firing President Obama.... And, at the beginning of this year, it looked as if the Republicans might win control of the United States Senate as well."
So what happened? For one thing, the vast right-wing media conspiracy started to believe its own hype -- and as a result got hoist on its own petard. Living in a carefully circumscribed disinformation cocoon eventually led to the entire party being sucked into a swirling "ideological black hole," as the right-wing media ginned up so much outrage that first cable crazies and later their mutant offspring, the Tea Party, took over the primary process. In so doing, they managed first to blow GOP control of the Senate, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with an odd insistence on putting up a succession of kooky kandidates, (ranging from Christine "I am not a witch!" O'Donnell to Todd "legitimate rape" Akin) and thus losing a series of eminently winnable seats. At the same time, their extreme insistence on policy purity ended up also driving moderates like Olympia Snowe clear out of the party -- and consequently, a Republican majority out of the Senate.
Next the conservative media focused on a number of equally kooky kandidates for president -- a veritable joke-of-the-week club that at one time included everyone from Donald Trump to Herman Cain -- while at the same time pushing Mitt Romney, the only contender with any real chance of later tacking to the center and winning a general election, so far to the "severely conservative" side of issues like immigration that he was never able to recover.
No, it wasn't the vaunted' "ground game," or Obama's magnetic personality, or indeed, much of anything on offer from Democrats that caused the Republican defeat. Obama's reelection wasn't so much a result of "destiny" or "demography," as the instant conventional wisdom now has it, as of sheer stupidity and denial on the part of the Republican elders. Their ostrich-like behavior, exacerbated by the breathless pandering of Faux News & Co., has seen Republicans lose the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Let them keep their false narratives and insistence that Nate Silver and the polls are somehow biased. As Conor Friedersdorf wrote in the Atlantic, "On the biggest political story of the year, the conservative media just got its ass handed to it by the mainstream media."
So Rush, Bill O, Glenn, Roger and pals -- please keep it up guys, we literally can' t do it without you!
And here's a modest proposal for Democrats, liberals and their progressive allies: instead of complaining constantly about Limbaugh and Beck or Murdoch and Hannity, start supporting them in any way possible. Contribute to their pledge drives. Patronize their advertisers. Lie to the ratings agencies to boost their numbers. After all, keeping Republicans in the dark with inane conspiracies and misinformation, cut off from accurate assessments of political and societal developments, and trapped in a "faith-based" rather than "reality-based" mindset, is clearly a winning tactic.]]>Superstorm Sandy and America's Politics as Usualtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.20640122012-11-02T11:37:08-04:002013-01-02T05:12:01-05:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/
But with both President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney diving back into full-time campaign mode, and soggy citizens preparing to slosh over to their waterlogged, garbage-and-sewage-strewn polling places on Tuesday, we should all take a moment before casting our ballots to consider "the new normal," and how each major party candidate for president has been steadfast in his resolve to ignore what is happening all around us, in plain sight, for as long as possible -- and certainly until after the election at the very least.
Despite this ostrich-like behavior, however, the fact remains that no matter which man is chosen to be next president of the United States, he will immediately face a deadly set of urgent crises, both domestic and foreign, that have somehow remained unaddressed throughout the years-long, multibillion-dollar political campaign that is finally and thankfully about to come to an end.
At home, the urgent issues encompass (but are certainly not limited to) what to do about the nation's aging and crumbling infrastructure, such as New York's more-than-a-century-old transit system, which was brought to a standstill -- for the second year in a row -- by a natural disaster beyond its capacity to withstand. They also include, of course, the indisputable fact of climate change and the increasing impact of ever-worsening extreme weather events -- caused in part by global warming and the much higher sea-surface temperatures it has created along the coast.
Coming just a week before Election Day, Sandy's storm surge and rising tide brought the self-styled "city that never sleeps" to its knees -- and also brought into sharp relief the effects that global warming is now having on its already decrepit and ill-maintained infrastructure. As Elizabeth Kolbert noted in The New Yorker, Sandy also "makes the fact that climate change has been entirely ignored during this campaign seem all the more grotesque. In a year of record-breaking temperatures across the U.S., record drought conditions in the country's corn belt, and now a record storm affecting the nation's most populous cities, neither candidate found the issue to be worthy of discussion."
Crummy, crumbling infrastructure and the reality of climate change aside, there remain many other pressing but ignored issues, ranging from an outmoded, last-century energy system and grid, and deepening social inequities, to burning questions of debt, deficit, high unemployment, a stagnant economy -- and those are just in the domestic side. Overseas, the potential dust-ups start in the ever-unraveling Middle East, with its unaddressed civil war in Syria, dangerous lack of progress in the festering Israel-Palestine conflict, looming attack on Iran and shaky progress in Iraq -- not to mention (and no one has) America's decade-long and obviously failed attempt to bring stability to Afghanistan.
Nor have I even mentioned the risky rise of China, or the fractured "reset" in relations with Putin's Russia, or a host of other, equally important but largely unattended international areas of concern... but then, neither have either of the men campaigning to be elected president of what still remains, despite its many mistakes and setbacks thus far during the 21st century, the most powerful nation on the planet. But after the election on Tuesday, the victor will no longer have that luxury -- and neither will we...
Rory O'Connor's latest book is Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media.]]>Both Romney and Obama Are Data Dumpster-Divingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19702352012-10-17T15:40:03-04:002012-12-17T05:12:02-05:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/
None of my business, you say? Probably not -- but Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have made it their business to know these and other intimate details of your personal life. Moreover, they may have already shared them with a host of your friends and colleagues, who in turn may have shared them with their friends and colleagues. What's worse, you may be getting a phone call soon from one of them, armed with these and other facts about you, and intent at "shaming" you on Facebook and other social media sites for not voting in the past and to persuade you, through an adroit mix of social encouragement and opprobrium, into going to the ballot box next month.
Sadly but predictably, the very same data-mining techniques now being employed by large corporations to pry into your privacy have emerged as powerful weapons on both sides of the battle for the American presidency. As the New York Timesrecently reported, "consultants to both campaigns said they had bought demographic data from companies that study details like voters' shopping histories, gambling tendencies, interest in get-rich-quick schemes, dating preferences and financial problems."
Of course, officials with both campaigns are admittedly doing their best to keep their sleazy practices secret and off the record. "You don't want your analytical efforts to be obvious because voters get creeped out," one unnamed Romney campaign official confessed to a Times reporter. "A lot of what we're doing is behind the scenes."
On the record, spokesmen for both sides naturally pledge allegiance to voters' privacy, claiming they are committed to protecting it and that they are both "adhering to industry best practices on privacy and going above and beyond what's required by law", as Adam Fetcher, an Obama campaign spokesman, put it, and "ensuring that all of our voter outreach is governed by the highest ethical standards", as Ryan Williams, a spokesman for the Romney campaign, said.
How high are their standards? Not very -- consultants to both campaigns admit to buying targeted demographic data from companies that creepily study our habits, preferences and problems. Both campaigns have planted software on voters' computers, for example, to see what websites they frequent -- "evangelical or erotic". And both have experimented with the idea of embarrassing non-voters "by sending letters to their neighbors or posting their voting histories online". One Democratic consultant wondered aloud if this is the year to start shaming. "Obama can't do it," he noted. "But the 'Super PACs' are anonymous. They don't have to put anything on the flier to let the voter know who to blame."
How bad is this hidden data-dumpster diving? Both the Democratic and Republican National Committees have already spent millions on data acquisition -- often paid to companies that are undergoing scrutiny from Congress over privacy concerns or have been sued over alleged privacy or consumer protection violations.
With social media a key determinant in persuading supporters to actually turn out to vote, the new techniques of data-mining and social shaming could play a decisive factor in this year's election. Both campaigns have been asking supporters to provide access to their profiles on Facebook and other social networks, so they can determine their connections to other potential voters in key "battleground states".
Clearly the Obama camp, with a long head start in the social media arena and a heavy 2012 emphasis on digital campaigning, is leading on this front. But as the Times noted, both Obama and Romney campaign officials "increasingly sound like executives from retailers like Target and credit card companies like Capital One, both of which extensively use data to model customers' habits".
Rich Beeson, Romney's political director, explained it best. "Target anticipates your habits, which direction you automatically turn when you walk through the doors, what you automatically put in your shopping cart," he said. "We're doing the same thing with how people vote."
For the record, then, I drink Samuel Adams beer, never eat at Red Lobster or Olive Garden, don't shop much (and certainly not at the Burlington Coat Factory,) and both smooth jazz and college football leave me cold. Does that make me an Obama or Romney supporter?
I'm not telling... after all, I cherish my privacy!]]>Old Wine, New Bottles: Social Media and the Presidential Campaigntag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19392152012-10-05T12:41:03-04:002012-12-05T05:12:01-05:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/How the Presidential Candidates Use the Web and Social Media" accurately noted:
From Franklin Roosevelt's use of radio, to John F. Kennedy's embrace of television, to Ronald Reagan's recognition of the potential for arranging the look and feel of campaign events in the age of satellites and video tape, candidates quicker to grasp the power of new technology have used that to convey a sense that they represented a new generation of leadership more in touch with where the country was heading.
So which emerging media technique has each campaign been utilizing in the 2012 race? Which candidate is best employing the new social media, how is he using it, and for what specific purposes? Answering these questions is important, because doing so will reveal the answer to an even larger and more important one: Who will be the next president of the United States?
If presidential campaigns are, in fact, contests over mastery of changing communications technology, it seems clear that challenger Mitt Romney is still trailing badly after Barack Obama. By most measures of how the campaigns are using digital tools -- including content posted online, number of platforms used, amount of public response and the number of shares, views and comments to posts, the Obama campaign is ahead. While Romney's campaign has made some strides to close the digital gap, it is still lagging behind.
"Digital is now a huge element of the Obama campaign and he is clearly ahead," says Nicco Mele, a pioneer in online campaigning who worked with both Howard Dean's presidential campaign in 2004 and Obama's 2006 Senate campaign. "Digital is mission critical for Obama -- it was front and center in his 2008 campaign, and now he has doubled down on it."
Digital strategy
Just as in 2008, Obama's current digital strategy targets very specific voter groups to a far greater degree than his opponent's. Supporters are offered digital opportunities to join many different constituency groups such as African Americans, women, young people, Latinos and so on. Once you click to join a specific group, content targeted to that constituency begins to flow to you through email and social media. The Romney campaign was late to this strategy and is still playing catch-up.
As the PEW report notes, "Obama's campaign has also made far more use of direct digital messaging than Romney's." Obama produced about twice as many blog posts and more than twice as many YouTube videos as did Romney, according to the PEW study. The gap is greatest on Twitter, where at one point the Romney campaign was averaging just one tweet per day versus 29 for the Obama campaign.
According to Twitter's blog, Obama's speech at the Democratic convention "set a new record for political moments" on Twitter. Overall, the Democratic National Convention led to an unprecedented amount of Twitter conversation -- more than 9.5 million tweets in total and about four million on just the final day, or about the same as the number from the entire Republican National Convention.
Still, the news isn't all bad for Romney. When data analysis company Socialbakers analyzed Obama and Romney's social media habits from May 1 to September 19, 2012, it found each candidate holding his own in different areas. While it's true Obama is a much more frequent tweeter, for example, Romney posts much more on Facebook. Socialbakers also found that although Obama had higher Twitter involvement, Romney's tweets go viral more often -- perhaps because Obama posts to Twitter so often his followers are less likely to share his content. Since Romney tweets so rarely, his followers may be more eager to share to their own networks. Additionally, Romney's Facebook fan base grew by 76 percent since May 1 -- although the base figure was low, while Obama's only grew by 8.83 percent over the same period.
Why does any of this matter? According to another definitive Pew study, 36 percent of social network site (SNS) users say the sites are "very important" or "somewhat important" to them in keeping up with political news; 26 percent say the sites are "very important" or "somewhat important" in recruiting people to get involved in political issues; 25 percent say the sites are "very important" or "somewhat important" for debating or discussing political issues with others; and 16 percent say they have changed their views about a political issue after discussing it or reading posts about it on the sites.
Social network sites are naturally most influential among so-called "digital natives" -- the young people who form a significant part of Obama's base. One-third of American adults under 30 get news on social networks now, as social media have far surpassed newspapers and equaled TV as a primary source of daily news. Moreover, many of Obama's strongest supporters -- young people, yes, but also minorities and women -- are more likely to use social networks for political information.
Democrats and liberals in general are most likely to say the sites are important, and the politically engaged stand out in their use of the sites. Of course, social media users are not truly representative of the electorate -- only about 15 percent of the population is on Twitter, for instance -- and the conversation on most social media sites is among younger, more active and involved potential supporters. But this, too, favors Obama, since the election results may depend on voter turnout. If the president can convert his current lead in virtual engagement to actual turnout at the ballot box, he will inevitably triumph -- even if Romney also gets a strong turnout from his base.
Despite the recognition of digital and social media's growing importance by both camps, however, it must be noted that neither campaign is actually making much use of the social aspect of social media. Neither candidate has been replying to, commenting on, or "re-tweeting" anything from citizens or indeed anyone outside their tightly controlled campaign bubbles. On Twitter, for example, only 3 percent of Obama's campaign tweets, studied during June, were re-tweets of citizen posts. Romney's campaign produced just a single re-tweet during that period -- and that was merely repeating something Romney's son Josh tweeted.
In theory at least, digital technology allows politicians to engage in a new level of "conversation" with voters. Were this really happening, it would transform modern political campaigning into much more of a dialogue. Instead, both current candidates are clutching tightly to their past reliance on command and control. Citizen content has been only minimally present on Romney's digital channels, and while the Obama campaign has made more use of citizen voices, it has kept them confined to one area: the "news blog" on its website where that content could be completely controlled.
Another sign of this outmoded mentality is the fact that campaign websites remain at the center of digital messaging. Even if a potential supporter enters a campaign's social network page, they usually end up back on the main website to donate, join a community, volunteer or read anything substantial. A recent redesign of the Obama homepage emphasized the centrality of the campaign website further. Rather than sending users to the campaign's YouTube channel, the video link now embeds the campaign videos directly into the website -- where the only videos available for viewing are the ones Obama wants you to see.
Both sides have also been using direct messaging solely as a way to push their carefully controlled messages out, and (in Obama's case) using new media to raise money and then spending it on old media -- namely television. But with the rapid transformation of the overall news landscape showing no signs of abating, television news and political advertising, which has held onto its audience through the rise of the Internet -- so far -- is increasingly vulnerable and will soon loosen if not lose entirely its hold on the next generation of voters. Television's value as a way of persuading voters -- either to vote for you, or more commonly NOT to vote for your opponent -- is rapidly eroding. So expect to see the first truly digital election next time around!]]>Mindful Media: Images and Voices of Hopetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19317592012-10-02T07:42:09-04:002012-12-02T05:12:01-05:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/
No wonder it often feels more like we are all navigating a minefield of media!
That's why it was so refreshing recently to attend and speak at Mind Full Media 2012, a gathering of media makers drawn from the disparate worlds of journalism, advertising and marketing, arts and entertainment and corporate communications and public relations. The event was organized by a non-profit group called Images & Voices of Hope, which is concerned with creating "a global dialogue dedicated to strengthening the role of media as agents of world benefit."
For more than a decade, members of IVOH have worked with both professional practitioners and aspiring young people, while attempting to shift the media's focus to "the world we want to create" instead of "problem-solving the world we have." Its stated mission is to increase "awareness of the choices those in media make that raise public trust, generate constructive meaning, and amplify human hope, enhancing humanity's capacity for life-promoting action."
The theme of this year's IVOH "World Summit" was "influence," and organizers posed some fundamental questions to begin the discussion: "Who's got the power? Who drives the agenda? How do you increase your influence in the conversation?" Since the nature of influence - and who exerts it - in the digital age is now shifting "in complex and subtle ways," they asked, "how do we meet the challenge to be truly mindful of the influence of our ever-expanding flow of media?"
The gathering took place about one hundred miles north of Manhattan, at a retreat center called Peace Village in the bucolic Catskills town of Haines Falls. A small but surprising group of varied media makers, young and old - from self-described "recovering journalists" such as ex-network investigative reporter Roberta Baskin to Dori Maynard, head of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, and from admen like Tom Burrell and Larry Kopald to entertainers like comedian Chris Bliss and Native American hip-hop artist Frank Waln - came together with Tibetan lamas, a sizeable and impressive group of students, and other seekers and citizens anxious to explore the impact of digital influence on networks of friends and followers, the science of the unconscious mind and covert influences on human behavior. The discussions were united by an emphasis on how to maximize opportunities to shape the media discourse for the greater good.
The first IVOH "conversation," with 180 people in media and related fields, was held in Manhattan in June, 1999. Since then, there have been more than fifty such events held all over the world, from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Halifax, Canada and from Santiago, Chile to St. Petersburg, Russia. Each has offered a mix of dialogue, reflection, presentations, workshops, music and art, along with sunrise meditations, tai chi, mountain walks and tasty vegetarian meals served by a smiling "staff" comprised of dozens of volunteers.
Imagine - a media-oriented group "committed to strengthening the role of the media as agents of world benefit." An organization dedicated to a belief that real transformation in the world will come "from valuing and building on what gives life and vitality to the world we have now, and, by creating clear images and stories of the way forward."
What a concept -- "mindful media" that actually benefits society!
What will they think of next?]]>Here Comes the First Digital Electiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15891512012-06-12T16:04:15-04:002012-08-12T05:12:06-04:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/
You might have thought we lived through that four years ago, when the online-focused campaign of Barack Obama revolutionized modern politics in ways that are still coming into focus. After all, no previous candidate or campaign had ever adopted technology and the Internet as the heart of its operation or used it on such a scale. Aided by MyBarackObama.com, the Facebook-like social network created with the assistance of that company's co-founder Chris Hughes, and employing a team of young, web-savvy programmers and developers who had cut their teeth on Howard Dean's 2004 presidential primary campaign, the underdog Obama embraced social media and hugged them closely all the way to the White House. He used social networks to raise record-breaking amounts of money -- some $500 million from three million donors who made a total of 6.5 million donations online. He also used the new media to circumvent longstanding media and political brands and communicate with his supporters directly and interactively.
"On MyBarackObama.com, or MyBO, Obama's own socnet, 2 million profiles were created," Jose Antonio Vargas noted in one Washington Post campaign post-mortem. "In addition, 200,000 offline events were planned, about 400,000 blog posts were written and more than 35,000 volunteer groups were created... Some 3 million calls were made in the final four days of the campaign using MyBO's virtual phone-banking platform.
Vargas reported:
Obama has 5 million supporters in other socnets. He maintained a profile in more than 15 online communities, including BlackPlanet, a MySpace for African Americans, and Eons, a Facebook for baby boomers. On Facebook, where about 3.2 million signed up as his supporters, a group called Students for Barack Obama was created in July 2007. It was so effective at energizing college-age voters that senior aides made it an official part of the campaign the following spring.
The political importance of emerging social media was also demonstrated when citizens began using that same emerging media, its powerful tools and looser, more extensive social networks to communicate directly with their peers about the election, as media platforms that hadn't even existed just four years earlier began to play crucial roles in campaigns and the delivery of information about them. Voter, candidate and party reliance on new tools and technologies -- especially those that facilitated controlling one's own media -- meant that the 2008 race for the presidency, with its viral emails, social networks, user-generated videos, fact-checking web sites, MySpace and YouTube debates and other online innovations, provided an ideal prism through which to examine the rise of social media and to assess its impact on longstanding media and political brands alike.
But if you think the Internet and emerging social media began to transform national politics in 2008, strap in --- the coming campaign promises to be digital on steroids.
The conventional wisdom, of course, is that the Democrats -- as evidenced by Obama's success -- "get the Internet" and continue to enjoy a wide lead over their Republican counterparts in the use of social media. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. As online politics pioneer Mindy Finn noted in an interview for my new book, Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media, Republicans "have now seized the new tools like Facebook and Twitter."
Finn was Director of "e" Strategy for the Romney campaign in 2008, when she employed web video, social networking, blog outreach, user-generated content gathering, email list building and online advertising to communicate the candidate's message, raise money and mobilize a base of support. "Social media is now absolutely central to all political campaigns," she told me. "The low barrier to entry gets you buzz, name recognition and effective money raising, all at a low, low cost."
Following Obama's November victory, Finn believes, Republican politicians understood and employed the power of online communications more so than anyone on the left. She points out that in the 2010 mid-term elections, many Republicans surpassed Democrats in their adroit use of social media and three Republicans in particular -- Marco Rubio in Florida, Sean Duffy in Wisconsin, and Rick Perry in Texas -- ran online campaigns that made a huge difference for them. Like her Democratic counterparts, Finn is certain there's a transformational shift going on. "Social networking is now the very foundation of your campaign, it supports everything you do," she says. "It can't be compared to other media and you just can't run old media campaigns like in the past."
Nowhere was that more evident than at this year's Personal Democracy Forum, the estimable annual technology and politics conference that was dedicated this year to "The Internet's New Political Power," where Romney's current Digital Director Zac Moffatt was part of a Harvard Institute of Politics-sponsored panel on the November election. Moffatt oversees digital strategy, online advertising, email marketing and online fundraising for the 2012 Romney campaign, and he boasts wide experience in and understanding of both the political and the digital worlds.
"The political campaigning/technology world is moving super-fast," Moffatt says, noting that his digital department is no longer an orphan child of the campaign, but has been granted equal status and a "seat at the table, its own budget and decision-making power" along with such more traditional areas as Communications. "It's all equal now,"Moffatt says. "The big difference is that there are more resources flowing into digital."
Like Mindy Finn, Zac Moffatt believes "the playing field is leveling" in the online battle for voter attention and influence, "especially on the margins, where the new technology gives great advantage," and that Republicans (or at least the Romney campaign) are no longer trailing in their use of new media tools and technologies.
In any event, it seems clear that, as Finn forecasts:
Both Republicans and Democrats will put an enormous effort into digital. Social networks are already having a major impact on all political calculations now taking place. They even are influencing the types of candidates we get, since they create more of an open door to run than in past. People no longer have to feel counted out in advance. Anyone paying attention out there knows this is a game changer.
"Going forward it will be social networks and mobile in particular that will be huge," she posits.
Everything will be much more distributed, there will be more partnerships, and much more outreach to bloggers and the community. Politicians will be forced to run less insular campaigns than in the past. Just being rich and throwing your weight around is not what wins campaigns anymore -- instead it's your networks, organically built. What wins today is being in touch and then responding to in an authentic way. When candidates actually believe this, and participate personally, then they see it power and that gets them to believe -- plus they benefit in many ways from the direct feedback. The candidate who can best tap into social will likely win in 2012. This whole new dynamic, in essence, is having a dramatic impact on all political calculations going forward.
(Rory O'Connor's book, Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media, has just been published by City Lights.)]]>Bye Bye Boortztag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15711302012-06-06T09:53:49-04:002012-08-06T05:12:10-04:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/a vicious son of a bitch," the Fox News host got it absolutely right.
Thus it is with profound satisfaction that I note the impending retirement of Boortz after four decades in radio.
After all, this is a fellow, who, as I noted in my 2008 book Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio, once suggested giving "a box of nuclear waste" as a "going away present" to Mexican immigrants, adding that we "tell 'em it can -- it'll heat tortillas." This is a fellow who referred to Islam as "a deadly virus" and a "creeping mold infestation;" a fellow who compares Muslims to cockroaches and calls U.S representatives like Cynthia McKinney "a ghetto slut" and "welfare drag queen;" a fellow who called Hurricane Katrina victims "complete bums, just debris." I could go on but I won't -- especially since Boortz soon won't either, thankfully!
There's only one problem, though -- he's going to be replaced on his syndicated talk show by none other than former Republican presidential buffoon Herman Cain. "Mr. Boortz. Your announcement was pure Boortz," the ever-articulate Cain quipped while quaffing a celebratory glass of champagne. "Neal is my brother from another mother."
Fittingly, Cain will take over on the same day that the next president is officially inaugurated. Here's hoping it WON'T be Cain's other brother, Mitt Romney...
Boortz, 67, has been the longest running talk show host on Atlanta radio, and is heard on about 240 radio stations nationwide. Industry bible Talkers magazine estimates that he has more than six million listeners a week, which ties him with Laura Ingraham for seventh place among all in the genre.
Boortz entered the national Radio Hall of Fame in 2009 -- and the Shock Jock Hall of Shame long beforehand! He will continue to do daily commentaries for Cain and will be a fill in for both him and fellow conservative talker Erick Erickson -- but other than that, we can all join Herman Cain in a toast as we drink to the downfall of Neal Boortz...
Rory O'Connor's newest book, Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media, has just been published by City Lights.]]>The News Dissector's Blogothontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15561742012-05-31T11:29:52-04:002012-07-31T05:12:17-04:00Rory O'Connorhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/
Schechter's self-dissection is as keen and clear as his ongoing analysis of our broken media system, available daily at his long-running News Dissector blog and now, in collected form, in Blogathon: Reflections and Revelations from the News Dissector, a compilation of critical media counterpoints that Schechter has been busy blogging and slogging through every day for eleven years -- every day, in fact, since that fateful one of 9/11, as the World Trade Center towers came tumbling down.
Since then, Schechter has offered a consistent counter-narrative to the daily news -- "posts, rants and raves" -- to the tune of some 3000 words a day. While others may be reading their morning paper, Schechter is busy writing, editing and aggregating his own, slicing below the surface of current events to "pick away at the sinews of what passes for journalism."
He differs from many other bloggers in several respects: for one, he is a professional journalist of high caliber and great experience; for another, he has a worldview and analysis that enables him uniquely to dig deep into the mainstream media's "institutionally established routines and patterns of coverage." This also allows him, as he notes, to "see structural biases and an ideological orientation."
It is this ability that distinguishes Schechter's body of work from that of the millions of other bloggers now practicing their own forms of journalism. Add to that his unparalleled decades of experience as a media critic and media maker of all sorts -- from on-air radio personality and television reporter to producer/director/writer -- and as both a privileged "insider" during stints at CNN and ABC to his previous and current status as an independent and "outsider" at Globalvision, the small international media firm where he (and, full disclosure, I as his co-founder and partner) continue a labor of love in order to "make media that matters."
"I moved from blasting network TV from the outside to trying to change it or at least influence it from the inside," Schechter recounts. "I came to know and like people in the industry, and learn from them. And yet at the same time, I felt estranged. I felt that I didn't really belong, because I wasn't an insider and didn't aspire to become one."
Thank heavens for that, because the rest of us have greatly benefited from Schechter's status and work as an outsider. Part of his success is due, as he notes, to class matters -- his DeWitt Clinton High, Garment Center, working-class upbringing brought with it an invaluable way of looking at the world and its power structures, as well as an outsider's consistent concern with important issues such as human rights, fights for freedom and social justice.
The insiders never cared too much for those issues, since, as Schechter observes, "as decision-makers they avoided being too controversial and shied away from rocking the boat" -- something the Dissector has rightly never been accused of! Instead, "TV programmers would tell me how much they admired me, but then explained that the programs I wanted to cover were, well, 'not for us.'" (One great example: PBS executives' infamous refusal to become involved with Globalvision's award-winning news magazineRights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television because, as they explained, human rights was considered "an insufficient organizing principle" for a television series -- unlike purple dinosaurs, cooking and stock tips, apparently!)
The strength of Schechter's blog -- and of Blogothon itself -- is, as he reminds us, "also its weakness." It is often -- perhaps too often? -- "a personal outlet, and a form of uncensored expression...It is also a platform for sharing personal experiences and passions." Although some may find Schecter's dissections at times too passionate and personal, many others will agree with his observation that "the blogs I like are outlets for independent voices, often offering dissenting perspectives that can rarely compete with branded corporate products for audience attention."
No blog is more of an outlet for an independent voice than that of The News Dissector, and none offers a more informed and informative dissenting perspective. Blogathon, the book, is also necessary; although Schecter's blog has 'only' been around for eleven years, " and as Schechter writes, it references work that "has its origins in the 1960s and even earlier." Given the ephemeral nature of the World Wide Web in general and online journalism in particular, much of the material in it might otherwise have been lost to time had this collection not been published.
Blogathon in an indispensable alternative to the commoditized corporate news food now being dispensed daily from the media outlet stores so many have already become inured to. Read it -- and share it widely!
Social media now accounts for nearly one quarter of all the time Americans spend online--the leading category by far, compared with less than ten percent for online games or e-mail respectively. At the same time legacy media are still in steep decline, as measured by both audience reach and advertising revenue, and the sweeping technological shifts and the unprecedented rupture in the long partnership of news and advertising brands that have been roiling them for years continue unabated, with the disruption still most notable in print media such as newspapers and magazines.
Meanwhile the media brand Americans spend the most time with by far is Facebook, the Internet's most ambitious, technologically sophisticated, and fastest-moving company. Its eight hundred million users--one in every nine people on Earth--spend an average of fifteen and a half hours a month on the site. The monthly usage of all news media sites, by comparison, averages only five to twenty minutes per month, while the total digital advertising revenues of all American daily newspapers is just $3 billion, compared to Facebook's individual share of $2 billion.
For all its success, however, Facebook also continues to infuriate large numbers of its users, as an unending series of poorly communicated changes to the site fuels further controversy. (The latest overhaul was announced at Facebook's fourth so-called "f8" event--its key gathering for developers, press, and the public--where Bret Taylor, Facebook's chief technology officer, proclaimed it "the biggest change we've made to our platform since we launched it at the first f8.") At the same time questions about the privacy implications of Facebook's vast presence on the Web--executives were forced to defend their practice of tracking every page users visit even after they have logged out of Facebook--also dog the company.
Just five years after its public launch, Twitter continues to grow in both size and importance too, delivering 350 billion tweets and signing up more than 600,000 new users every day. For its part, YouTube is seeking new and better ways to serve its 490 million unique monthly users, who now spend a staggering total of 2.9 billion hours per month on the site. Still struggling not to be completely overwhelmed with unedited content, YouTube executives have recently partnered with a variety of outside entities to create and curate videos for one hundred new channels that will feature regularly scheduled programming on such broad themes as fashion, news and sports.
Legacy brands of all sorts continue to fragment and falter, particularly those of the news media, as the advertisers that once supported them increasingly decamp for social media in general and Facebook in particular, where the same recent changes that dismayed users are considered brand-friendly. And Google--once the leading global brand--continues to lose its buzz. A November 2011 front page story in the New York Times headlined, "Google's Chief Works to Trim a Bloated Ship," detailed how the company's " midlife crisis...threatens to knock it off its perch as the coolest company in Silicon Valley." Reporter Claire Cain Miller dismissed Google as "an aging giant ... being pushed around by government regulators and competitors like Facebook." And as AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke reported, even Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt now admits, "I screwed up," in not pressing the company to focus more on mounting a challenge to Facebook. "I think the industry as a whole would benefit from an alternative," Schmidt added.
On the political front, elections are breaking out all over as we head into another year of historic change. In the Middle East, the promise of the Arab Spring is being put to the test of ballots in lieu of bullets, as Facebook revolutionaries transform themselves into more traditional candidates for public office. Here in the United States, politicians from both major parties are embracing social media as never before. While Barack Obama tries to rebuild the grass-roots movement that propelled him to the White House in 2008 by employing everything from YouTube to Twitter, where he has over 10 million followers, to Facebook, where he boasts 19.3 million friends--chief among them Mark Zuckerberg, whom the president has assiduously courted--Republicans say they are better prepared than ever to compete online in the 2012 contest.
"The notion that the Internet was owned by liberals, owned by the left in the wake of the Obama victory, has been proven false," says Republican political online strategist Patrick Ruffini, who points out that many Republicans in the House and Senate now use social media tools more than Democrats. "It is not necessarily that Democrats or young people or liberals have become less active," notes Aaron Smith, the author of a study on the subject by the Pew Research Center for the Internet and Society. "It is more that older adults, conservative voters and Tea Party activists have come to join the party." And Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the influential TechPresident.com blog, says, "This will be the first election in modern history that both parties are understanding the potential of the technology to change the results of the election. Both Republicans and Democrats are ready to use online platforms and are no longer skeptical of its potential."
Local media strategies will be key to both sides in America's 2012 national election. Social media will be the difference maker, since strategists have figured out how to harness the Internet for hyperlocal purposes. "With old media tools, local press, radio and TV, it was difficult for a candidate to wage a nationwide, local strategy," says one media analyst, Brooklyn Law School's Jonathan Askin. "The Internet finally makes local campaigning, with national themes and local messaging, effective for presidential politics." It may not matter, however, if we are entering a "period in politics that's sort of fact free," as former President Bill Clinton recently warned...
Meanwhile, the Occupy movement in the United States and its international counterparts all over the world continue to agitate, demonstrate, and aggregate in number and influence. They are not content simply with bypassing legacy media corporations to spread their message but have also begun developing new media tools for future use. Examples include the "I'm Getting Arrested" app, which alerts legal support and family via text messaging when a protester is getting arrested, Occupy The Hub, a website for aggregating video feeds, tweets and live chats to provide one-stop coverage of what's going on in the movement, and OccupySMS, a program that allows one person to send a text message quickly and easily to a huge mass of people. "With this sort of innovation, the Occupiers won't need major media companies to get the word out," as Benish A. Shah, vice-president of Strategic Digital Media at the Global Executive Board, told the Huffington Post. "The people following this are going to go online and find the information and find it from other sources."
Finally, the single most important new trend within the digital information revolution--the exponentially increasing amount of unvetted and unverified information now washing over us all--continues to flashflood forward at a frightening pace. What's worse, it's harder than ever to tell which waves in the torrent might carry relevant and trustworthy news and information.
A Pew report released in September 2011 showed that only one-quarter of those surveyed think news organizations get the facts right--a new low since the question was first asked in 1985. Two-thirds say stories are often inaccurate--a new high--and nearly three-quarters believe that journalists try to cover up their mistakes rather than admit them. For the first time in any such survey, as many people say that news organizations hurt democracy (42 percent) as protect democracy (42 percent). The situation is so dire that the MIT Center for Civic Media has begun to pursue the development of a "nutritional label for news," which would "semi-automate evaluating the quality of an article" and could be visualized "as easily as an FDA 'recommended daily amount' nutritional label for food."
Everyone Wants To Be a News Filter
All the while, the debate over the "Daily Me" vs. the "Daily We" still rages. As academic media researchers argue over how much they really know, our privacy continues to vanish, unwanted personalization thrives and disputes continue over how best to filter and sort through it all. What are the best means and mechanisms of dealing with the twin crises of too much information and credibility-and-trust: the old, time-tested brands? The new recommender systems and algorithms? Curators and influencers? Friends and followers? Or an adroit mix of all of the above?
"Everyone wants to be a news filter now," Mathew Ingram wrote in a post on GigaOm. "As the avalanche of information coming through social networks and real-time tools like Twitter continues to grow, the need for filters to make sense of that tsunami of data also increases, and it seems as though everyone has a different way of trying to solve that problem." As Ingram noted, however, "Relevance is a tricky problem to solve." Many new apps and approaches suffer from similar problems: "Either they are filled with the same content I've have already seen in other places, or the links simply aren't relevant.
"It's good that plenty of services are trying to solve the news-filtering problem, and different users may choose different solutions," Ingram concluded. "So far, no one seems to have come up with the one-size-fits-all solution to this modern dilemma."
Leading communications researchers remain optimistic, however, particularly about the still-developing roles of both social media and algorithms and learning machines. The University of Michigan's Paul Resnick is among those who remind us that we are still in an experimentation phase. "One key is to develop algorithms that give people what they really want and not the current naive version of it, i.e. what they 'like,'" says Resnick. "Instead of just popularity, there is an opportunity to give people something that will take into account that we have preferences that are sets of items that will engage us the most."
The machines must move away from measurements of mere popularity to become more multidimensional, says Resnick, "to consider sets of items over individual items, and to offer us crossover, or 'strange bedfellows' items. We need more sophisticated models of why people want what they want--and we also need consciousness raising among developers."
MIT's Ethan Zuckerman agrees. "With machine learning, the problem now is it produces echo chambers, which are a comfortable filter but may lead to personalization and homophily," he warns. "But in the future, we'll get better systems. In addition, everyone is looking for curators now, and each has own pronounced point of view, so we'll have to learn to 'read the net."
Like Resnick, Zuckerman is ultimately hopeful that progress can and will be made in the ongoing effort to separate signal from noise in the crowded and chaotic news-and-information environment. "In diverse enough worlds, we will be able to triangulate our way to the truth," he says. "The real question is how to rebuild institutions--gate keepers if you will--who can tell us the difference between what is credible, relevant and trustworthy and what is not."
