PressThink: Nine Story Lines in a New Campaign Narrative

Nine Story Lines in a New Campaign Narrative

Dean's success puts pressure on a campaign narrative inherited from the pre-Internet era. There are changes underway that are not the normal evolution from cycle to cycle. More original reporting is needed on the "open" style emerging in politics. Here are some routes in.

For those who buy the premise that something’s happening in campaign 2004, there are hundreds of new stories potentially reportable out there. The campaign system has been de-centered in the open style pioneered by Howard Dean, although it must be added: not completely so, and not always convincingly so, not by Dean alone, and not necessarily to winning effect.

The Dean campaign, most agree, is the most different, taking the biggest departures. This is primarily visible in the influence of the Internet on his entire candidacy, but the influence of the Net is not confined to the Net anymore. That’s a big story, most of which has not been filled in.

Here are nine threads in a revised public narrative. Anyone can follow them to find vital stories that show us there is something happening in presidential politics, but not in the pattern we had grown to expect. And I do mean anyone willing to do such reporting, whether the title is citizen, student, weblogger, journalist, writer, linker, amateur, pro…

Nine Story Lines in a New Campaign Narrative

1.) The Control Revolution
2.) Donating Talent
3.) Distributed Ownership
4.) The Inactive Switch Sides
5.) Campaign as Curriculum
6.) The New Sociability in Politics
7.) The Discovery of Voice
8.) The Self Informing Citizenry
9.) It’s a Two Way World

So these nine items are not so much story ideas, as ideas for generating an arc of stories. You could call them points on a map of shifting terrain in politics. Maybe it is easiest to call them beats, as a newsroom would. But they are beats from beyond the standard master narrative, in which the baseline story of the campaign is winning the campaign.

To be a great reporter is hard and it takes experience. To author a timely report for intelligent use by others is not as hard, and there is no experience required. The reporter’s authority originates in a very simple claim: I was there, you were not, so please let me tell you about it. Citizens can claim that. Webloggers already do. (When they “blog” an event.) And journalists do it for a living. All have the chance to start telling us a different campaign story, which is there to be read as events unfold.

These notes treat only the Dean campaign, which has a head start; but innovation in politics goes well beyond him. Other candidates—and especially the Republican party, when it gets in gear—may well drive things in directions unknown as yet. Dean’s “discoveries,” if that is what they are, will not remain with him.

The Control Revolution: A top down model still operates, but overlaid with another. Give up some control and your supporters will do important work for you. They will add value, and because you don’t have to supervise or control it, the costs won’t mount at headquarters. Wherever control in the campaign is relinquished, even a little, politics is changing because the previous regime had tried to perfect “message control” from the center.

Of course anything can affect message delivery, so control of the message from the top was an attempt to control everything in the campaign— not just the candidate but supporters, the press, the feedback, the background, the mood. A simple document like daily talking points, distributed around so people know what line the campaign is taking, is a perfect summation of the control regime inherited by all players in 2004. The story of its demise, which is only a partial demise, needs careful tracking.

Here’s Zephyr Teachout, Dean’s director of Net organizing, in Ed Cone’s Baseline Magazine account, the fullest we have on the Dean departures.

“We had way too much e-mail to deal with, so we had to empower people in the states, let volunteers handle the e-mail in Oregon. It was very unorthodox.” So the campaign rushed to push away control. “When you build an organization in 17 states, with no money, you give away power as fast as you can,” says Teachout of those cash-strapped early days. “We had to let them have control, let them help the campaign how they wanted to help the campaign.”

Donating Talent: Follow the money is one of the biggest cliches in journalism, post-Watergate. Follow the talent rounds out the picture of who’s donating what to whom. People who donate their intellectual capital to Dean, who think up stuff or solve problems, are their own kind of campaign finance reform. Don’t give cash. Give of your mind, your learning, your problem solving skills, your code.

Who donates this way, why, and to what effect is not going to come from a Federal Election Commission report, so it will have to be reported out by journalists. Follow the story and it leads right to the gift economy, with its different rules for generating winners, and defining self-interest. Who knows what gift economies can do in presidential politics? Someone in tune with them (and willing to do the reporting) could tell us. Here’s Cone:

At one point, for instance, Teachout needed software developers to create a new Web tool that would allow volunteers to set up their own blogs and read news feeds. She used Blog for America to call for programmers who knew PHP, an open-source scripting language. Eighty-five developers responded almost immediately; more than 180 ended up working on the project.

Distributed Ownership:. The campaign is not “in” the same places it used to be because Dean has distributed ownership of it around to more people and networks of people. Important activities go on at the margins, and so the margins are not marginal anymore and the whole chart has to be redrawn. In fact there are now two campaigns, Campaign Out There, and Campaign at Burlington, where the payroll is. They talk.

Covering the campaign “out there” means finding key points where ownership of some project arguably important to Dean’s chances lies not with Dean or his paid advisors, but with supporters whose original work it is. They own it. What kind of “work” does the Campaign Out There actually do? What are the advantages of a distributed campaign for president and how far can they be pushed? That story line awaits its developers. From Samantha Shapiro’s cover piece in the New York Times magazine, Dec. 7, 2003 (now behind a pay wall):

A number of campaign staffers are in regular contact with Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, 14, who lives in Sitka, Alaska. Growing up on a remote Alaskan island, Kreiss-Tomkins has become especially adept at finding pen pals and online friends, and he now uses that skill on behalf of the Dean campaign, recruiting supporters through the Internet and then sending lists of e-mail addresses to the campaign.

The Inactive Switch Sides: Any time people are drawn into politics from inactivity there is a potential story. But the open style has unique advantages in calling out to those who once kept their distance from politics at the presidential level— or felt shut out. Some are switching sides— from spectator to engaged participant.

When people capable of being effective and entrepreneurial switch from totally inactive before to involved as a factor in the campaign today, the game has changed and the circle of knowledge has been expanded. New forms of intelligence are available to politics, but they endanger the old, and there is where the story line starts. This is Sterling Newberry from BOP (The Blogging of the President), a site where I am a co-editor.

The people who Dean and Trippi identified—and the Clark Movement found—are, in one sense, ordinary citizens. They are consumers, individuals you meet. Most are professionals, but in this age, almost everyone is. One cannot be a telephone worker without having training in a level of symbolic thinking that would have gotten you a degree in 1932. These people are used to being heard. They are used to fighting city hall, and winning, on a variety of issues— or they are young and still willing to fight. They push back on their management, or start their own companies. They are articulate, and they read widely. They buy books disproportionately to the population as a whole.
Many people who have turned out to be effective political actors, are not insiders, but people who took a wealth of experience from their careers and applied them to politics. The professionalization of society bears fruit: we make a living by relearning our own trades constantly, hence learning a new one is not alien.

Campaign as Curriculum: Much of what happens in and around the Dean movement seems to be about teaching and learning. One of the insights the Governor and his advisors had is: don’t organize to win when it’s not clear how you can win. Instead, organize to learn, and from that the way to win emerges. Internally, this meant Dean operatives had to recognize and work with concepts unfamiliar in politics, often taken over from the open source movement, Silicon Valley, and other haunts of the educated classes. Cone:

Almost from the start, the doctor made such information system concepts as “distributed intelligence” and “self-organizing networks” part of the basic philosophy and structure of his quest for the White House.

In the campaign “out there” the Dean curriculum is to teach people how to be active citizens again— including the most basic things in citizenship: post a flyer, run a meeting, attend a rally, have an argument, write a response, and recruit others to do all this with you, because you’re interested, it seems to matter, and there are places like weblogs where it is easily done. In all this activity, people are receiving an education. There’s a curriculum. But what are they learning? A good education writer could tell politics a new story. Cone again:

Blog for America readers, for instance, police themselves in terms of the tone and content of comments. When “trolls” – blog jargon for hostile commenters looking to make trouble — come in with negative or provocative remarks, pro-Dean commenters react by pledging donations for each negative comment, which creates a disincentive for the trolls. After this idea was posted on the blog, the number of trolls diminished to almost zero.

The New Sociability in Politics: If there are new ways of gathering for the purpose of “doing” politics (and the meetups and smart mobs are that) then people do more than politics at those gatherings because that is what a human gathering is: always a big social event. It’s not that there’s “time to socialize” at a political meet-up. Rather, people are there for the sociability (they feel the desire to meet) which is perhaps suffused with politics— a subtler story to follow. Novelists, fiction writers who aspire, take note. Your skills needed here.

In 2004, the social “story” is graduating from sidebar status to a position closer to parity with the classic dispatch from inside the process. Coming from outside the process has as many narrative advantages now as inside baseball did during the era of command and control in presidential striving. Shapiro of the Times explains:

Dean supporters do not drive 200 miles through 10 inches of snow — as John Crabtree, 39, and Craig Fleming, 41, did to attend the November Dean meet-up in Fargo, N.D. — to see a political candidate or a representative of his staff. They drive that far to see each other…
People at all levels of the Dean campaign will tell you that its purpose is not just to elect Howard Dean president. Just as significant, they say, the point is to give people something to believe in, and to connect those people to one another. The point is to get them out of their houses and bring them together at barbecues, rallies and voting booths.

The Discovery of Voice: People never stopped talking about politics as the campaign grew to its over-controlled state. But they did stop talking about it as something they owned and could operate. By drastically multiplying the opportunities for speakers and actors, the style of campaign favored by Dean opens another story line in politics, which is all the discoveries people make about the conditions in which they were held voice-less (or inert) before. Inertia spills its secrets the moment you reverse and commit yourself to politics as an actor. Slow that film down and you have a story, maybe.

What I mean by voice is speaking in public, about issues and problems, to a community of some kind that is engaged in politics, and may react. (Therefore there is always some risk involved.) Webloggers for Dean are voices for Dean in this sense. If Dean’s success depends on others gaining voice, this poses all sorts of novel problems in listening, culling, feedback and encouragement. And the first time there is a big split in the Dean camp, or between Campaign Out There and Campaign at Burlington, the discovery of voice will take another fateful step. Cone:

A key way of carrying on a campaign-wide conversation is the comment area on Blog for America. More than 100,000 comments have appeared on the weblog since June 10, with as many as 2,200 coming in a single day. Gross assumes that about 5 percent of visitors actually read the comments, and maybe 1 percent make comments of their own. Many visitors have never heard the word “blog” before they come, says Gross, yet many commenters end up thinking of themselves as bloggers, too. That’s part of the conversation that informs the campaign.

The Self Informing Citizenry: Involvement is informative. Activity instructs. Writing a weblog makes you seek out information to write about. E-mailing people about politics distributes facts about politics. You learn from the people you talk with. Lose an argument and you will come back with more knowledge. In all these ways people are self-informing.

But add to that the Web, where even casual users are active searchers. More and more, and in slow enough fashion to get overlooked, publics of various size and spread are becoming self-informing, meaning: members stay informed, but without the expected reliance on the media. What they do daily informs them, but they don’t get it from an information pipe. Nearly all the media’s tools for reaching citizens are coming within reach of those citizens, and this too changes the balance of power. Here is a story line journalists especially need to track. Ed Cone at his weblog:

The Dean Media routes around the conventional press, but also piggybacks on it, feeds off it, critiques it. The mainstream media is still very important. But the Dean campaign doesn’t have to rely on it. Dean Media has its own newspaper — the weblog — that updates in real time and lets anyone contribute. It has online audio and video capability. It uses multiple electronic channels, from email to social software, to communicate with its troops, giving them marching orders and allowing them to organize themselves. Everyone gets a weblog. And the DeanSpace environment links it all together.

It’s a Two Way World: The era of message sending from a knowledge point “inside” the operation, where both candidate and campaign were tightly controlled, (and when controls failed things went to crisis) gave birth to the inside baseball style in journalism, which is itself message sending— from the press to us. Both tried to assure us that the professionals are in charge, their knowledge is sound, they understand all variables.

This is not a sustainable illusion in a two-way and de-centered world where the tools of communication are coming into public hands. And so politics in the open style is here and there being de-controlled. Listening, of all things, becomes a vital talent at the center. But another way to put this is: the system to survive must become more two way. Command and control yields to “markets are conversations” (Weinberger and Searls), “news is conversation” (Jeff Jarvis) and the era of “correspondence” between the campaign out there and the full timers at headquarters (Teachout). This is from Shapiro:

”What’s happening is an unusual and unprecedented correspondence between the campaign and us,” [Teachout] says. It takes me a moment before I realize that when she says ”the campaign,” she doesn’t mean the people running the headquarters in Burlington. She means the people she’s going to visit in her Airstream.

The two way world can be reported on, of course. And it’s an intriguing story. But sooner or later journalism will be asking itself how it can become two way, and that will be an even bigger story.

Doc Searls: “there is no demand for messages. You don’t turn on your TV or open your paper and say “Hey, I wonder what message _______ is sending me this morning.’…”

Dave Weinberger, in “What People Still Don’t Get About the Dean Campaign,” says: “The Dean campaign hasn’t merely inverted the broadcast pyramid so now the bottom is ‘messaging’ to the top. It’s done away with it to a large extent, relentlessly focusing on giving up control of its message in favor of enabling supporters to organize themselves.”

Britt Blaser: “As far as I can tell from close up and personal, there’s no limit to what role you can play in the campaign, as long as you provide an end-to-end solution and don’t call on the paid staff for resources of time, attention or money. Essentially, Joe Trippi’s mantra is, ‘Talk among yourselves and everything will work out.’”

For getting up to speed on the open style in presidential campaigning, also see:

Ed Cone in Baseline magazine: The Marketing of a President.

The New Republic: Joe Trippi Reinvents Campaigning.

Ann Weathersby in Fast Company: Joe Trippi’s Killer App

See these related entries from PressThink:

The Master Narrative in Journalism.

Politics in a Different Key.

A Politics That is Dumber than Spam.

Important if True: Online and Offline Meet Up to Change Politics.

Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press.

Private Life, Public Happiness and the Howard Dean Connection.

Posted by Jay Rosen at December 17, 2003 1:03 AM Print

The People Formerly Known as the Audience: "You don't own the eyeballs. You don't own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don't control production on the new platform, which isn't one-way. There's a new balance of power between you and us." More...

Migration Point for the Press Tribe: "Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable." More...

Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over: "Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation-- for the user's trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There's a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times 'brand,' and creating it from scratch." More...

"Where's the Business Model for News, People?" "It’s remarkable to me how many accomplished producers of those goods the future production of which is in doubt are still at the stage of asking other people, “How are we going to pay our reporters if you guys don’t want to pay for our news?'" More...

National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News This American Life's great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that "information" and "explanation" ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. More...

The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. "Just so you know, 'the media' has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not 'get behind' candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.." More...

They're Not in Your Club but They Are in Your League: Firedoglake at the Libby Trial: "I’m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise. Don’t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn’t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think." More...

Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class: "We’re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they’re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening." More...

Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well." More...

A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism "It's mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the 'so-called' from in front? With video!." More...

The Master Narrative in Journalism: "Were 'winning' to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?" More...

He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User "Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in." More...

Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism: "It's a "put up or shut up" moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like... distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting... and put them to work to break news?" More...

Introducing NewAssignment.Net: "Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn't, couldn't or didn't." More...

What I Learned from Assignment Zero "Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results." More...

If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue: "Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world." More...

The View From Nowhere: "Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for 'vocal critic,' and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism." More...

Rollback: "This White House doesn't settle for managing the news--what used to be called 'feeding the beast'--because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country." More...

Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop: ""Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004." More...

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press: "Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain." More...

Journalism Is Itself a Religion: "We're headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers." More...

News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation: "Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for "news as conversation," more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry's internal dialogue." More...

Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One: "They're not equals, but Washington and Arlington have their own spheres. Over the newspaper and reporting beats Len Downie is king. Over the website Jim Brady is sovereign. Over the userï¿½s experience no one has total control. There's tension because there's supposed to be tension." More...

Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die: "An industry that won't move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don't have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise." More...

Grokking Woodward: "Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn't have such access, and this probably influenced--for the better--their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn't broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk." More...

Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate: "This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the 'we're fair and balanced, you're not' crowd, wherever I may have located you." More...

Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News: "O'Reilly feeds off his own resentments--the establishment sneering at Inside Edition--and like Howard Beale, the 'mad prophet of the airwaves,' his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice." More...

Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent: "Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: 'parachuting in.' That's when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it's hard to walk in other people's shoes." More...

The News From Iraq is Not Too Negative. But it is Too Narrow: "The bias charges are getting more serious lately as the stakes rise in Iraq and the election. But there is something lacking in press coverage, and it may be time for wise journalists to assess it. The re-building story has gone missing. And without it, how can we judge the job Bush is doing?." More...

The Abyss of Observation Alone. "There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional 'role' that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don't trust journalists. They don't trust that abyss." More...

"Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post." Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus: "Opinion based on information 'everyone' has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in. More...

Out in the Great Wide Open: Maybe you heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain Dealer with four "outside" voices brought in from the ranks of Ohio bloggers: two left, two right. Twelve points you may not have seen elsewhere." More...

Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media: "What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never." More...

Notes and Comment on BlogHer 2005 "I think the happiest conference goers at BlogHer were probably the newbies, people who want to start blogging or just did. They got a lot of good information and advice. Some of the best information was actually dispensed in response to the fears provoked by blogging, which shouldnï¿½t be avoided, the sages said, but examined, turned around, defused, and creatively shrunk.." More...

Top Ten List: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most of today's journalism comes out of the market economy." More...

A Second Top Ten List: What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly." More...

Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds: "Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out." More...

The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism "It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of 'producer democracy' than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform." More...

No One Owns Journalism: "And Big Media doesn't entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn't. These things were always true. The weblog doesn't change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends 'the press' to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night." More...

Brain Food for BloggerCon: Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness "Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is "the story." Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access-- as in getting your calls returned." More...

Dispatches From the Un-Journalists: "Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It's a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed."More...

Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes "Journalists, you can stop worrying about bloggers 'replacing' the traditional news media. We're grist for their mill, says Satullo, a mill that doesn't run without us. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity.."More...

Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press: "Spin Alley, an invention of the American press and politicos, shows that the system we have is in certain ways a partnership between the press and insiders in politics. They come together to mount the ritual. An intelligent nation is entitled to ask if the partners are engaged in public service when they bring to life their invention... Alternative thesis: they are in a pact of mutual convenience that serves no intelligible public good." More...

Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "How is it you know you're the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that's why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what's going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate." More...

Psst.... The Press is a Player: "The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?" More...

Die, Strategy News: "I think it's a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news."More...

He Said, She Said, We Said: "When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report 'what happened.'" More...

If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus: "Maybe irony, backstage peaking and "de-mystify the process" only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I'm heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism's contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?."More...

Convention Coverage is a Failed Regime and Bloggers Have Their Credentials: "No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing." More...

Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat: "'A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,' he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand."More...

What Time is it in Political Journalism? "Adam Gopnik argued ten years ago that the press did not know who it was within politics, or what it stood for. There was a vacuum in journalism where political argument and imagination should be. Now there are signs that this absence of thought is ending." More...

Off the Grid Journalism: “The assignment was straightforward enough,” writes Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, “talk to people.” When a writer dissents from it or departs from it, the master narrative is a very real thing. Here are two examples: one from politics, one from music. More...

Questions and Answers About PressThink "The Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device, a library, an editor. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis (because most users won't pick that option) is Web dumb but media smart. What's strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones." More...

Blogging is a mass learning experience because it has created a 'safe' space in which people can express themselves, in very many cases for the first time. People are now learning to argue and discuss in a place (blogspace) where they can shelter from the dead hand of of political correctness, which has for many people frozen them out of any involvement in political discourse over their entire adult lives.

The PC phenomenon has been a puritanical spasm which handed the entire public discussion space, for a generation, over to those who happened to want to repeat the accepted platitudes. You could work your way through the thickets of restrictions it imposed to express yourself, but only if you were both articulate and extremely careful at all times. The effort was beyond most people, who simply gave up and got on with their private lives instead. This devastated political participation rates and the authenticity of public discussion, which came to seem 'meaningless' to much of the public.

The ability to blog, anonymously where people feel the need, is enabling the citizenry to wander 'off the reservation' to which they had been confined by a self-appointed mob of PC enforcers. This is a profoundly good thing, which may indeed be expected to impact politics in a big way, and by no means only on the left.

Posted by: JK at December 17, 2003 9:42 AM | Permalink

All this talk of the Dean campaign's "revolutionary" aspects is going to look pretty silly when his campaign self-destructs due to amateurs being on a too-long leash. Pros with control is still how successful campaigns are run.

Posted by: rivlax at December 17, 2003 10:18 AM | Permalink

Hi Jay:

You say:
"The two way world can be reported on...sooner or later journalism will be asking itself how it can become two way, and that will be an even bigger story."

Jon Greenberg, at New Hampshire Public Radio, is giving it a try. For more see my online interview with him yesterday at http://www.pjnet.org or just click on my name below.

I think his approach is a bit too controlled and believe he should think more in terms of fast, cheap and out of control. I talk about that at my personal website which explores the power of collective thinking:
http://pjnet.org/weblogs/biggerbrain/

Posted by: Leonard Witt at December 17, 2003 10:49 AM | Permalink

I agree with rivlax to this extent: a major test of the Dean campaign's openness, two-wayness and such will be the first time there is a big screw up, or serious conflict that splits the community, or divides Burlington from the campaign out there. It's not hard to imagine. And we'll know a lot more about all the claims for a "new" pattern after one of those episodes-- which seem inevitable in the months ahead.

The established pattern for getting elected president of the United States is not easy to elude, just because some fancy theorist at headquarters says he's "distributed" the controls around. This may be jargon for... we don't know what's going on. I can see reasons for skepticism, rivlax. Many reasons.

But I don't know how you know this bit: "Pros with control is still how successful campaigns are run." Seems to me that is a more open question. But this is why we need people--reporters--on the ground, asking whether any of this open flow, the weblogs, meet-ups and all, plus the social side, actually makes a difference to what ultimately matters: the vote, who takes power.

Len and Matt: I know there is two-way journalism out there, and you point us to some. Thanks. This is something like an unknown continent, even though we can point to a growing number of examples.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 17, 2003 2:22 PM | Permalink