Are Comments Useful?

A moment of tension - or at least controversy - during the “Tech-Politics” session was when a journalist asked what was the journalistic advantage of having all these reader-contributed comments after an article. If people are commenting on such trivial issues, such as how many question marks to use, what is their purpose? Reading those comments gives him a headache.

The panelists disagreed, and Chuck DeFeo said his mindset is the problem with traditional mainstream media.

Panelist Micah Sifry quickly argued that comments are important because they provide valuable information to the journalist. “Your audience is smarter than you,” he said.

But you can’t expect your audience to automatically generate brilliant comments, he said. They must be encouraged.

Sifry suggested that the traditional journalist has to get involved with the audience. The journalist has to prove that he or she is paying attention. He or she has to read the comments and respond to them. When newspapers don’t pay attention to comments, Sifry said, the process will fail.

Other journalists added their suggestions for how comments can be nurtured to be more useful. Panelist Nancy Scola suggested using the community model, in which a community of readers can decide to take down an inappropriate post.

Panelist Colin Delany offered the example of Slate.com, which takes the best comments and puts them together in an easy-to-digest discussion. He said the audience will then take the process much more seriously and contribute substantial comments.

In many ways, this discussion does get to the root of the so-called problem with or controversy over traditional mainstream media. Are comments useful to the process of journalism, or are they just a business model that will generate more readers? If journalists do not understand the power of comments - that yes, the collective audience knows more than one individual journalist - then the comments will be ignored. They will accumulate, but they will not be nurtured and therefore will not generate useful, substantial, thoughtful material.

The 1960 Moment

A common theme at the convention is already shaping up to be the 1960 moment of today.  This refers to the breakthrough of television in American politics during the Nixon/Kennedy debate, where Kennedy cleaned Nixon’s clock because he was so telegenic.

Or maybe that is not the whole story, argues Michael Cornfield, who says that Nixon made the mistake of acknowledging his own deficiencies during the debate.

Cornfield claims that the 1960 movement of this era was last year during George Allen’s “Macaca” slip-up, which led candidates to realize there every public moment is now being recorded, and can potentially be used against them in a forum where many people can easily see it.

On the other hand, Chuck DeFeo, a blogger for the conservative web site Townhall.com, and a major player in George W. Bush’s online campaign, says that the 1960 moment has not yet come, and politicians are still trying to figure out how best to utilize the internet for their campaigns. 

Micah Sifry, of the Personal Democracy Forum (personaldemocracy.com) argues that politicians in America are not properly utilizing the internet, compared to Great Britain, where conservative party leader David Cameron has a daily video where he addresses comments left on his blogs by the public.

I wonder if back in 1960 before the debate people sat around talking about how nobody had figured out how to make television work for candidates the way that radio worked for FDR with his Fireside Chats. 

The Cash Trail

In the classic tale of journalism, All the President’s Men, Deep Throat urges Woodward and Bernstein to “follow the money, follow the money.” Michael Cornfield, a George Washington University political scientist suggested at the lunch meeting today that journalists do the same thing to create unique content. Cornfield said the story that nobody is covering is the donors of for each candidate, who they are, what they want, and what they think their money is buying.

Of course, this story is covered in brief flurries that accompany major fundraising announcements, such as the blockbuster news of two weeks ago that the candidates have summed $150 million in contributions in the first quarter of 2007.

But too often this quickly gives way to speculation about the “mood” of the country, poll-watching, and day-to-day recounting of campaign events, all things as Cornfield pointed out, that can be just as easily learned from reading blogs.  Plus, a political blog comes equipped with forums, comment sections, and other interactive features that the dead-tree pages of old media don’t offer.

To stand out, a paper needs to take advantages of its natural advantages: full-time reporters with the time and resources to research donors, talk to their friends, co-workers, and find out who is backing each candidate. 

What Cornfield didn’t mention is a natural disadvantage of the paper: their stated mission is to provide the average man on the street with the news of the day.  That average man is really a combination of intense daily readers, and occasional readers, and people who don’t know that the prosecutor guy on Law and Order is also a former senator who might run for president.

So for those of us that are political junkies it is tiresome to see yet another New York Times article with a headline like “Conservatives Not Enthusiastic About ‘08 Candidates,” every week or so.  But to those who have just picked up a paper for the first time this year, this probably makes for interesting reading.

Sites like politico.com, the Daily Kos, or Townhall.com don’t have to worry about how acquainted their audiences are with the latest political developments; nobody would go to these sites if they had not been following the latest news in the field. 

But that news has to come from somewhere, so newspapers have their work cut out for them.  It takes time to read through campaign finance statements, and research donor information.  But look at what gems it can reveal.  The following list of revealing campaign expenditures the reporters at Slate.com unveiled this morning:

* John Edwards spent campaign funds on two separate $400 haircuts this quarter

* Mitt Romney is the cheapest, making his staff double up at Super 8 motels, and offering them subsidized snacks (25 cents per soda, 50 cents per vending machine item) rather than buying them outright.

* Hillary Clinton owes a polling firm $277,000, and has spent by far the most on polling information.

Try and find a blogger who wants to parse pages and pages of financial statements to come up with these.

The ‘Amazing Race’ ‘08: Don’t Forget the Donor

“You know how they say we only use 10 percent of our brains? I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts.”—Owen Wilson in Wedding Crashers.

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Campaigns are only using 10 percent of the Internet, said political scientist Michael Cornfield, former director of research for the GW & Pew-backed Democracy Online Project (now VP of ElectionMall), in his opening keynote, “Politics and the Internet: What Do We Really Know?”

The public and in some ways the press are now trained to expect the marriage of Web 2.0 and politics to produce breakthrough discoveries or disseminate ill-conceived media that can make or break political campaigns. But as Cornfield stressed, George Allen’s 2006 “macaca” moment was simply the nadir of an already disintegrating campaign.

“Tech innovation brought into the marketplace is not significant on its own,” said Cornfield. While 2006 was YouTube’s year, it didn’t make or break these races, the campaigns and candidates did. Similarly, the first televised presidential debate—Nixon v. JFK in 1960—did not necessarily produce a sudden sea change in which voters went purely on looks as much as the candidates themselves reacted to their performances.

Television remains the mass medium of choice among Americans, although the Internet is gaining in popularity, especially among the younger set. But it was not an Internet campaign that definitively changed the tone of the media and in turn the momentum of the 2004 election.  The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was a donor-funded political group that, in the final weeks of the campaign, created TV and radio ads disparaging John F. Kerry’s Vietnam service and spread rumors—most of which, if not all, have only been verified as false—insinuating that, among other things, he acted unethically on the battlefield during the incident for which he was awarded a purple star.

Who exactly were the donors and private interests behind the Swift Boat Fund and how long had they been planning it?

Cornfield could not have possibly overstated the importance of micro-analysis of campaign usage of media and new tech and of profiling big donors and supporters. As the public’s use and comfort level with the Internet as a socially and politically reverent medium continues to grow, so will the number—and the power—of individual campaign donors. Thanks to the resources made available by the FEC and OpenSecrets, major donors can be identified and their campaign contributions, monetary and otherwise can often be tracked. Cornfield recommended journalists band together and create forums in which they listen to—and interview—groups of donors. It would be interesting to see how this could be effective on both sides of the political aisle—we’ll see if any donor profiles come out of large-scale events like YearlyKos in Chicago in August or even the GOP debate May 3rd at the Reagan Library.

McCain and Giuliani may have been early frontrunners to be the GOP candidate, but, now, where did all of Romney’s millions come from?

The general public will continue to dissect the candidates, their histories and intentions, but who will follow the money to the source? Are campaign donors the new kingmakers as Cornfield suggests?

Follow the Money

I am Hanna Ingber Win, and I’m one of the USC bloggers. I am a graduate journalism student at USC Annenberg. I write a column and contribute blog entries for PopandPolitics.com. I have been writing about gangs, cops and my personal life. This week, I am blogging about blogging.

Michael Cornfield kicked off the Politics in Cyberspace seminar this morning as he gave tips to the journalists in the room on how to better cover politics and the 2008 political campaign.  He argued that journalists should focus on covering the donors to political campaigns because donors are a “rich lode that should be mined.”

Donors are crucial, he said, because they control the money, which controls the campaign.  “Money is an endorsement...an investment,” he said.

He also argued that the journalists should focus on interviewing donors because the bloggers are doing everything, except interviews.

But why? Why aren’t bloggers doing more interviews? Are they lazy? Clearly not. So why?

After the talk, Alfred Hermida, who teaches at the School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia, told me bloggers don’t interview much because they like to offer commentary, opinion. But what about columnists like Nicholas Kristof? They do plenty of interviews and offer commentary. Isn’t the best commentary from well-informed writers?

Bloggers should take Cornfield’s advice: go interview donors. They hold the power to politics. What will the traditional journalists do then? Well, do it better.

Welcome to the Covering Politics in Cyberspace Blog

With more than 18 months until Election Day 2008, it is already the most digitized election in U.S. history—with all the challenges and opportunities that distinction implies. Candidates have built their websites, hired (and fired) their bloggers, joined social networking communities and staked their virtual claims in Second Life.

More than 20 professional multi-platform journalists representing news organizations from throughout the U.S. are participating in a special seminar April 18-21 focused on the internet strategies of both political campaigns and the news organizations that are covering them. In addition, the Investigative Reporters and Editors will provide sessions on how watchdog “money and politics” journalism can be integrated into multimedia coverage.

A group of University of Southern California graduate students will blog the 4-day seminar, sharing what they hear and see from a perspective that includes their own insights as consumers of New Media and future journalists.

We welcome outside comment and questions that help keep the conversation on this important topic dynamic and on point.