Tweeting Mumbai

I watched this happen. It said a lot about providing information rapidly to the already-focused. I'm not sure what else it said.

Huh?

If you don't know what's going on right now, scroll down to the Think, Think, Think post.
And read everything else in the context of that.

This week, in class discussion, all of you will be expected to participate in each side:
1. Helping the Atlantic take the next step, move up to the next level, become a bigger player in political coverage.
2. Positioning Bobby Jindal so that, in 2010, he's right about where Obama was in 2006.

But on Monday, all of you will receive specific assignments that will place you on one side or the other.

Bobby Obey You

It's no surprise to me that, since hiring Levenson and DeCrescenzo, Jindal is getting these kinds of kissy face profiles in the dead tree media.

But is that the right place to launch him?
And is "the new Obama" the right meme?
Should they start working the bloggers who aren't buying it? (Cesca is all HuffPo-connected.)
The TownHall crowd seems intrigued. Give them access?
What are the risks of being the hot new flavor too soon?

Doctor My Songs!

Now John McCain is suing Jackson Browne.

"The MCain people never really got their minds around this whole question," says Kevin Simpson, an expert in music copyright issues in political campaigns. "They had problems right down the line about use of copyrighted material.""

Simpson cited Van Halen, Heart and Foo Fighters among the bands that bumped heads with McCain staffers over use of their music.

Antonioli Announces Grant, Names Controversial Raciti ME

New publisher of the Atlantic Online Courtney Antonioli announced that her company has won a $1 million Knight News Challenge grant to develop news operations in two mid-sized American markets -- Hartford, CT and Columbus, Ohio.

"We're changing the mission of the Atlantic, while preserving its very special brand name," Antonioli explained. "We already have the best stable of racehorse bloggers in our Voices line-up. Our next step is to enlarge the platform and make room for more daily, deadline reporting and analysis. As experiments, we're going to apply some of our new thinking to these two test markets, but that's part of a much bigger set of ideas."

Antonioli announced several key new appointments. Unknown Michael Raciti will will become managing editor Jan. 1. "I have to go through some psychological testing first," he explained. TV veteran Cheyenne Seymour will undertake the job of making Atlantic Online competititve with other outlets in its use of news video.
Kasey Shoemaker will head up a special team that begins brainstorming political coverage for 2010 and 2012 immediately.

Spotted on the wires

Jindal makes his move.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) is in Iowa today, according to CNN."Jindal's considered by many in the Republican party to be a rising star and his trip to Iowa, the state that kicks off the presidential primary season, is raising speculation that he might be interested in making a bid for the Republican Presidential Nomination in 2012. But Jindal says such talk is misplaced and that he has no plans to make a run for the White House."

Jindal has, however, placed on retainer the Connecticut political media consulting firm of Levenson and DeCrescenzo Strategies, LLP. One of the firm's two principals Harry Levenson offered no specific comment on Jindal

"I will say that the game is changing," said Levenson. "This time, the formula is: the lessons from Obama's success + the observable changing slopes of the media + the X factor = a 2012 win. Now, if you'll excuse me, Richard and I have paying clients to talk to."

Baffled? Don't know where to turn?

There are some terrific sites on this week's subject. Most of them, unfortunately, explore the problem more than they do the solution.
Scroll down the main page of the Nieman lab. (You'll even see your friend Nate Silver cited.)
This is another place -- Knight -- that's trying to get mainstrea media ready for the future. You really have to explore around to find what's meaningful to you.
Explore Poynter.
I got sucked into this part of Poynter, and was struck in particular by this:

Target and customize. Participants were taken by my colleague Kelly McBride's presentation on "millennials" -- the huge MySpace/Facebook generation that lives to share good times, photos and sometimes information with their friends. It is an open question how news products might be tailored to their distinctive communication style, but the answer sure is not a "voice of God," one-way declaration of what's news, as Josh Benton of Nieman Journalism Lab put it.

Diane McFarlin, publisher of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and a past president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, expressed the hope that "the millennial generation may, in fact, take user-generated or user-influenced content to a level that will work for the community-at-large. (So far it hasn't.)"

CJs

There's a lot being said about citizen journalists these days.
PressThink tries to define it. Poynter tries to peel the onion. Seattle tried to do it.

Think, think, think

We'll be doing two exercises for the next class, and I want you to get read for them.

In one, we'll be the leadership of a news organization -- something with a digital platform that links to a print product -- getting ready to cover the 2012 campaign. Courtney will be our Publisher, and she''ll be taking our suggestions and plans for keeping up with changing technology.

In the other. Harry will be the campaign manager for Jindal 2012. He'll be asking the rest of his, his staff, for ideas on how to best exploit new media.

You're really going to have to reach out your dendrites and think about all this.

To impress Courtney, read this and incorporate it into your thinking.

Fim and figor

This site -- very Twitter-friendly -- is worth exploring. The Media-tagged tuff is right up our alley.

But so is the overall idea of everytihng being short and punchy and hip.

The wired reporter

This article describes new style of campaign reporting.
What are its inherent risks and advantages?

The New York Times is trying to exist on Facebook.

Meawhile, the LA Times, trying to figure out the future, talked to the founder of Craigslist.

This is what one journalist thinks the others need to do.

I hear America Twittering

OK, you must start by reading this.

And then read this.

One way to think about Twitter. Substitute Obama for the Pope in the example there, you know?

And note this description of Maddow.

Maddow seems to have genuinely charmed younger viewers, a Twitter-savvy, podcasting generation that has hankered for someone more like them and delights in her use of "duh," her obvious intelligence and authenticity, and her ability to be both idealistic and skeptical about politics. She eschews vanity and insists she won't stop dressing "like a 13-year-old boy" when she can.

Wolf Boy, etc.

I've decided it's a nice tradition to watch an amusing (if not terribly relevant) clip right after the break. So here is something from Mike.

The code of Limbaugh

Rush is, of course, almost a separate story. Kasey takes a stab near the end of this post, at getting at Rush's code.

Meanwhile, Mike, like Kasey, has parent issues around this stuff.

And Rich wonders about the relationship between Rush (and similar hosts) and their listeners.

Rich also gives us this very weird video which, nonetheless, strips itself down to one of the most stark arguments of certain kinds of media -- that they allow ths listener to join a club of select smart people.

Zieglerama -- And the Eff you Universe

I'm hoping to use the Ziegler story as kind of a jumping off place tonight, so make sure you read the wonderful DFW Atlantic artile. Harry has the link here.

When you read that, then remarks like the one Courtney flagged make more sense because they kind of fit with the way people talk in that environment.

Joe's own personal story kind of confirms Nate Silver's basic point -- that people get tired of being stimulated in a certain way. Here's some more analysis by Kevin.

Ziegler currently makes little documentaries, including this one.

Here's a WSJ article about the poll that touched off this whole imbroglio. And some analysis by Mike.

Crazy like Fox

What did Fox News ultimately win up pushing as news during the home stretch of the election?

Lauren, back from the dead, has a video we MUST watch. And a poll that makes no sense.

Will Fox simply invert its role now, as Kevin suggests?

Cheyenne found a study of of Fox.
And she did her own analysis of how they handled today's news.

Conservatives, Humor, Irony, Sincerity

Harry, as usual, has a lot for us to think about. We can start with this video and related Caucus item. Which made me think of this article. (I confess, I think the article somewhat conflates irony with all humor.) I mean, irony has been kind of the province of the left, but Obama -- who draws out sincerity from us -- kind of invites a newly non-ironic stance.
Meanwhile, as Harry has rightly detected, it isn't really true that the conservative media is not funny. Some of hem have to be funny, but differently funny.

Kathleen Parker and other stories

In considering the functioning of specifically conservative media, please incorporate the Washington Times, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the Weekley Standard, the National Review and anyone lese who seems relevant to you.

Matt Drudge?

It's illustrative to look at this in terms of what another country thinks of it.

And interesting dispute broke out in the conservative press this week, again triggered by Kathleen Parker. You can start here with an extreme right blacklash against Parker. Or here with the column that provoked it. Or here with her friend getting mad at her. Weirdly, Parker wrote a column earlier this year which freaked out even people who are pretty used to red-meat, nativist rhetoric.

Become an expert on conservative talk radio and the Fairness Doctrine

Browse these articles to get a (very negatively tinged) look at the state of conservative talk radio today.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is, in general, a good (but non-approving) source of information about the rise of talk.

"One of the things that conservative talk radio does for Republicans is creates a coherent, conservative ideology that is reinforced hour after hour, to fairly large audiences every day. The problem for the Democrats is figuring out what that coherent ideology would be if it were offering the alternative point of view.
The talk radio host is trying to instruct an audience, in lines of argument, that can be marshaled in defense of the ideology expressed by the host. And under that is a coherent set of arguments that the person who's listening hears again and again. And as a result when the person confronts a person who ordinarily he wouldn't engage, he's now prepared to engage in the argument and make the conservative point of view salient to that individual.
What political talk radio hosts do is pick the facts that advantage their case and then make those facts the most salient facts for their audience. They fall within the range of omission that characterizes contemporary politics. When you look at political debates, for example, Republicans, Democrats, both do it. The biggest sin is a sin of omission. They don't tell you what would hurt their case.
Well, that's what political talk radio does. It selectively moves to feature the facts that best make the case for the ideology that advances the candidate in the moment that supports the agenda of the conservative talk radio host. So, the notion that talk radio hosts are just up there polluting the political process by egregiously lying is simply not true."

This gives you a sense of that "perfect storm."

The raw numbers.

In 2007, the people saying conservative talk radio had too much power were ... conservatives.

There's a new wave of paranoia sweeping through that industry about the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine.

Kasey has some pretty cool video about "a virulent proponent of fairness."
And Cheyenne tells us what Bill O'Reilly thinks.

But if you read Courtney's mega-post and click through the the Media Matters stuff, you can see why Schumer and others have some real qurestions about what's being said on the airwaves.

Gobble

Palin is still sort of a silver lining for everybody. (Kasey post.)

Maybe we're all losing our minds because many of us, like Joe!, seem to think this clip actualy warrants semi-serious analysis.

I like this post from an NRO columnist about the Palin turkey mess because it raises a lot of interesting questions about media skills. fairness, etc.

Here's the (modified) clip, via Courtney.