Everybody suddenly got a lot more freedom.

The article posted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism had so much good material in it.  Below are several excerpts I pulled out, along with my thoughts (in blue) on the findings. 

If you wanted to sum up the past decade of the news ecosystem in a single phrase, it might be this: Everybody suddenly got a lot more freedom. The newsmakers, the advertisers, the startups, and, especially, the people formerly known as the audience have all been given new freedom to communicate, narrowly and broadly, outside the old strictures of the broadcast and publishing models.
I wonder if the new freedom that audience members have been granted to communicate with each other more readily via the internet, etc has kept the newsmakers in check?  If more people have access to the news, and are talking about it, it functions as a checks & balances for newsmakers.

The most important thing about the relationship between advertising and journalism is that there isn’t one. The link between advertiser and publisher isn’t a partnership, it’s a sales transaction, one in which the publisher has (or had) the upper hand. The essential source of advertiser subsidy is lack of choice; so long as businesses have to rely on publishers to get seen, publishers can use the proceeds to pay for journalism, regardless of advertiser preference. 


The American public has never paid full freight for the news gathering done in our name. It has always been underwritten by sources other than the readers, listeners or viewers.
What do they mean - "done in our name"?  I understand that a lot of the news is paid for by sponsors, holding companies, etc.  If the news adopted a model where the public funds the news creation - would it change?

The internet wrecks vertical integration, because everyone pays for the infrastructure, then everyone gets to use it. The audience remains more than willing to pay for reproduction and distribution, but now we pay Dell for computers, Canon for printers, and Verizon for delivery, rather than paying Conde Nast, Hearst or Tribune Co. for all those services in a bundle.
So instead of spending money to have the paper delivered each day, we spend money on the hardware and products like computers that we use to get the news.  Why would this wreck vertical integration.  Couldn't you still target people based on interest? 

When people want to read on paper, we are increasingly printing it ourselves, at a miniature press three feet away, on demand, rather than paying someone else to print it, 20 miles away, yesterday.
I wonder how many people are printing out articles?  As mentioned in class last week, I once read a study that talked about how most people learned to learn using paper - books, worksheets, etc. This means that for them to fully absorb information it is best if it is printed out.  I wonder if this will change in the coming decades, since children these days are doing so much learning on computers at such a young age.  

Publishers also typically engage in horizontal integration, bundling hard news with horoscopes, gossip, recipes, sports. Simple inertia meant anyone who had tuned into a broadcast or picked up a publication for one particular story would keep watching or reading whatever else was in the bundle....The web wrecks horizontal integration. Prior to the web, having a dozen good-but-not-great stories in one bundle used to be enough to keep someone from hunting for the dozen best stories in a dozen different publications. 
So the web is not good for vertical or horizontal integration.  This is because people can pick and choose the information they want to access, and have so many more options for media consumption.

The spread of social media has created a new category of ads that are tied to media without subsidizing the creation of content.
I take this to mean that ads on the internet, directly benefit the provider or host of the news information - which can just be a platform that sources news media from multiple different sources.  Thus the ad revenue doesnt directly influence the reporter out in the field.  It can influence the type our quality of stories a platform can buy/publish, but not necessarily the actual reporting.  

The article has lot of great information - hope to read some more of it later. 

The Secrets of the 2012 Campaign

An interesting article that provides insight into the Obama and Romney campaigns. 

Below are a few takeaways that stuck with me:

47% Comment
Once the 47 percent comment came out, Rhoades said Romney showed his character under the pressure.... But while the video may have stopped Romney’s ability to cure his aloof and out-of-touch image, the Obama strategists say it was not the boon that people thought at the time. “Those people were not moving toward Obama but moving away from Romney,” said Simas of the changing in polling in the aftermath. These were voters who would eventually move back to Romney. “No one believed us at the time,” says Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter. “We were saying that as this 2 percent moved away from Romney it wasn't ours. The race was closer than people thought at the time."

Polling
Advisers had predicted that Romney would win decisively. That confidence was based largely on their polling, which was based on a generous interpretation of the electorate.

The Obama campaign, by contrast, had several different streams of polling information coming in. This allowed Obama’s camp to more accurately understand what the undecided electorate was thinking and what their voters believed, so they could hone the president's message and the scripts volunteers would use on the doorstep when canvassing.

Conventions
The net benefit after the two conventions was enough to give the Obama team confidence to engage heavily in Florida, a state they were not going to fully commit to until they saw how things stood in early September. 

Facebook
In 2008, the Obama campaign did an analysis that concluded that 99 percent of the people the campaign contacted by email voted for Obama.  Of Barack Obama's now 33 million Facebook fans globally, they are friends with 98 percent of the U.S.-based Facebook population."

Check out the full article for more! 

Effect of Media Coverage

Interesting overview of the media cover in the campaign from Pew

 


 

• Obama received no clear bounce in media coverage from the third debate. In the four days after the October 22 debate, which focused on foreign policy, 15% of Obama's coverage was positive while 28% was negative. That is similar to the previous week, which followed the second debate. Romney's coverage during those same four days was also largely unchanged from the week before, 21% positive and 34% negative.

• Hurricane Sandy dominated the news, but not campaign coverage. In the election's final week, only 4% of the campaign-related coverage was about the storm. And of those few campaign stories that focused on the hurricane, the treatment of Obama was mostly neutral or mixed. However, coverage of the storm may have had a more indirect benefit for Obama by depicting him in passing references responding to the disaster. While the president was not a major figure in these stories, they have may have influenced public attitudes about him.

• In the final week of the campaign, both Fox News and MSNBC became even more extreme in how they differed from the rest of the press in coverage of the two candidates. On Fox News, the amount of negative coverage of Obama increased-from 47% in the first four weeks of October to 56% the final week. Meanwhile, positive discussion of Romney grew, from 34% of segments to 42%. On MSNBC, the positive coverage of Obama increased from 33% during most of October to 51% during the last week, while Romney's negative coverage increased from 57% to 68%.

• The conversation on the three social media platforms studied moved in different directions during the final week of the campaign. On Twitter, Romney had his best stretch of the general election in the final week; 32% of the conversation was positive compared to 45% negative. On blogs, however, it was Obama who had his best week of the entire period studied; positive posts were roughly equal to negative (28% positive to 27% negative). The tenor of the Facebook conversation changed relatively little-the conversation about Obama stayed steady and Romney's declined a small amount.

• On Election Day, the differences between the three social media platforms emerged again as each served a different purpose. Twitter was the most instantaneous; 53% of the conversation involved users sharing breaking news or personal opinions. On Facebook, half (50%) the conversation involved personal political expressions. Blogs were more focused on the meaning of the election results, where 47% of the discussion involved post-mortem insights or the relaying of stories regarding broader themes.

One and done, a 6-year presidency

This a cameo blog appearance. 

My Dad recently wrote an article for the Cape Cod Times. The article brings up the idea about one six year presidency term instead of the potential for two four year terms.

What do you guys think? 

By GARY J. BEACH

November 15, 2012

Over the past six months I have asked this question to friends and business colleagues: What percent of the 44 presidents of the United States were "one and done" presidents? That is, presidents who served one term, or less than one term, because of illness or assassination.

Most pause for a moment and say, "25 to 30 percent."

They are shocked when I tell them only 16 American presidents — Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama — were "re-elected."

The overwhelming majority, 64 percent of American presidents, were one-term presidents.

This misperception on presidential election history is easy to understand. In 28 of the 32 years leading up to the 2012 presidential election (or 88 percent of the time), the United States was governed by re-elected presidents.

Americans accept re-elected presidents as the norm when, in fact, they are not.

Here's my idea: Repeal the 22nd Amendment to the United States Constitution (the amendment that limits an American to two consecutive four-year terms in office) and in 2016 elect American presidents to one six-year term.

Now, a newly elected president spends the first year in office attempting to turn campaign promises into legislation. Year 2 finds the president embroiled in midterm elections. Year 3 brings the committee to re-elect, and Year 4 is consumed by the election campaign. The second-term president relishes a "mandate" for a year before becoming a lame duck after the midterms in the second presidential term.

Not so with a one-term, six-year president.

A six-year president can, from Day 1,fill administration posts, sponsor legislation and deal with foreign leaders without having to worry about making decisions based on a run for re-election. An administration that would be in office for six years might also find it easier to recruit bright people from the private sector to join the team. Why? For the same reason. The president will call 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. "home" for six years and they would be assured of a longer runway to get programs in their respective departments off the ground.

There are more reasons why this idea makes political sense.

With a four-year-term presidency, the opposition party can simply dig in its heels and say "no" to major pieces of presidential legislation. They are empowered to do so because they are gambling the president will lose his or her footing by midterms and be out of office two years hence.

Now, if they had to deal with an occupant of the White House who was there for six years, it would force opposition leaders to work more closely with the president, because the American people will not put up with six years of political gridlock in Washington, D.C.

And a six-year term in office would force a president to deal with opposition leaders in Congress. Why? Because the president wants to leave behind a record of accomplishments — the legacy, if you will — and it would be frankly embarrassing if a president did nothing for 72 months.

My favorite reason for electing one-six-year-term presidents is the significant reduction of money wasted on campaign fundraising. Fundraising has no social or governmental value. It takes up a significant portion of a president's time and has brought down at least one president, and the only segment of American society that benefits from it are the media outlets who run attack ads constantly during campaign season.

If Congress repealed the 22nd Amendment, over a 20-year time frame there would be a 40 percent reduction in the number of presidential elections. Hundreds of millions of previously wasted re-election campaign fundraising dollars could be put to better societal use by wealthy individuals and special-interest groups to buy plant equipment, hire people and grow businesses.

The current system is broken. Both politically and financially. 

This approach fixes both.

Gary J. Beach, publisher emeritus of CIO Magazine, splits his time between South Chatham and Sherborn.

Optimism Waning?

A CNN/ORC International survey released Monday indicates that 56% of the public thinks the country will be better off four years from now, with four in ten saying it will be worse than they are now.

The survey also found:

• 54% say they are enthusiastic or optimistic about the president's second term
•  The 54% figure is a bit less than the 58% who felt that way about President George W. Bush's second tour of duty in November of 2004
• 44% are pessimistic or afraid about the president's second term
• 52% approve of the way Obama is handling his job as president
• 43% saying they disapprove

• 53% t say the president's experience from his first four years in the White House will make him a better president over the next four years
• 13% saying it will make him a worse president 
• One in three saying it will make no difference

Check out the full article for more statistics 

Missing Campaign Topics

This is one of the topics I think was not thoroughly discussed during the 2012 campaign for the presidency. 

Clean Energy & Climate Change
Yes, this was briefly talked about during one of the debates, but since it is a topic the effects everyone, regardless of their party, I was surprised that there wasn't more light shed on this issue.

Romney on energy
Who wins on energy

TV Media Covered Biden's Smile Nearly Twice As Much As Climate Change

This was written by Dr. Ricky Rood on climate change on wunderground.com 

Looking forward to the 2012 election, I don’t expect that climate change will be an oft articulated issue. The issue out front will be jobs, and the prominent link will be made between the exploitation of fossil fuels, new jobs, and energy security. Our approach to climate change will remain quietly in the hands of those savvy enough to use the unique knowledge provided by climate projections and those post-government truth tellers who no longer have to look away.  

"Dear Media, Mission Accomplished!"

Matt Philbin, the managing editor of the Media Research Center's Culture and Media Institute, recently wrote a pretty sarcastic article that highlighted all the conservative issues that the media 'conveniently neglected' to cover during the election.  Philbin's opinion definitely skews right, as can be seen by the below quote, but the article also brings up some interesting points. 

Well, my media friends, congratulations. You did it again. Your guy is safely re-elected. And the victory must be all the sweeter since you unexpectedly had to work for it.

Philbin highlights how the "Fast and the Furious" scandal (Homeland Security let Mexican drug gangsters buy lots of guns and then forgot to track them until one killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent) got minimal coverage.  Also how much money and resources have gone into green energy venues over the past several years, without substantial results. 

While I dont agree with all of Philbin's sentiment regarding the media, the article definitely provides some intriguing reading and food for thought on whether the media intentionally or unintentionally skews to the left.