Why a journalism class leans toward Obama

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The Clinton campaign has been complaining they aren’t getting a fair shake from the news media. No idea if that’s true or not. But Cory Bergman at Lost Remote shares this story:

"This is fascinating. A University of Washington journalism class is aggressively blogging the 2008 campaign. They’re attending primaries and caucuses, cameras and laptops in hand. The professor, David Domke, says he’s noticed a lean towards Obama among the students in part because of the way Obama’s campaign staff respected the bloggers.

“The Obama campaign treated us like pros — they called us back within minutes, set up interviews, got us press passes, went out of their way to make the campaign accessible,” Domke writes. “The Clinton campaign, in contrast, didn’t return a single phone call, didn’t provide press access, and did virtually nothing to encourage our coverage.”

Domke concludes: “The Clinton campaign has made the case that Obama is nothing but rhetoric; he’s supposedly all words, while she’s all action. Our experiences showed us that their campaigns — at least in Seattle — were exactly the opposite. In their treatment of my students, Clinton’s campaign was all talk, while Obama’s was all walk.”

Andrew Sullivan: The Clintons’ Last Stand

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“Clinton is a terrible manager of people. Coming into a campaign she had been planning for, what, two decades, she was so not ready on Day One, or even Day 300. Her White House, if we can glean anything from the campaign, would be a secretive nest of well-fed yes-people,  an uncontrollable egomaniac spouse able and willing to bigfoot anyone if he wants to, a phalanx of flunkies who cannot tell the boss when things are wrong, and a drizzle of dreary hacks like Mark Penn. Her only genuine skill is pivoting off the Limbaugh machine (which is now as played out as its enemies). Her new weapon is apparently bursting into tears. I mean: really.” [Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish]

This kind of post-mortem is showing up all over the web. Too soon? Don’t know. But they remind me of this photo of HRC with my friend and co-work Kay Henderson, taken during the campaign in Iowa. Senator Clinton looks so… serene.

Has Barack stepped on his Obama?

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HRC lashed out at Barack Obama today for using a strategy out of “Karl Rove’s playbook” by making speeches of hope while sending Ohioans what she called “false and discredited mailings” on health care and trade policy.

There’s a good analysis at FactCheck.org which concludes the direct mail piece "… lacks a good amount of context and could mislead those who are not familiar with Clinton’s plan." The mailer also includes a quote from The Daily Iowan:

“forcing those who cannot afford health insurance to buy it through mandates … punishing those who don’t fall in line with fines.”

Again from FactCheck.org: "Obama doesn’t tell readers that this is a college newspaper written and edited by University of Iowa students. That’s not to say it’s wrong, but a student newspaper carries less authority than a professionally written and edited major U.S. daily."

That’s chicken shit BO, not at all what your supporters expect from you. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on this one. Maybe you didn’t see this flier before it went out, but that’s no excuse. Just give us the facts and we’ll decide who has the better plan.

Diggnation in St. Louis

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Me and a couple of pals drove over to St. Louis this week and stood in line in the bitter cold for most of an hour to watch a taping of Diggnation. If you’re not familiar with Diggnation, think Wayne’s World for the Internet with lots of beer. And in this case, a live audience of 300+ screaming, twenty-something fans. Almost all male. I’ve seen less rowdy hockey crowds.

I found this video of the pre-show (we had much better seats) on Digg (appropriately enough). As I watched the taping, I had the sense we were seeing a new kind of entertainment for a new audience. This is not your father’s TV. Freed from the constraints of networks and the FCC, the hosts can guzzle beer and say whatever comes to mind. And the crowd was very much part of the show.

Campaign like it’s 1999

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Good story in the NYT on spending by the Clinton and Obama campaigns. The focus seems to be the mis-management of spending by the HRC camp. But this little nugget caught my eye:

“Mr. Obama broadcast 3,000 more advertisements than she did, and he was able to air those ads not only in the states that were immediately up for grabs but also in contests on Feb. 5 and beyond. Mr. Obama spent nearly $480,000 on 1,331 spots in Missouri; he won the state’s primary, a closely fought contest and a national political bellwether, by one percentage point.”

No matter who wins, this campaign will be sliced and diced and examined for years to come.

Apple wants to be your news and information station

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“An Apple patent reveals that the company is working on a podcast aggregator that would dynamically collect the news that you are interested in and deliver a personalized news podcast. In other words – Apple wants to be your news and information station. The system would allow you to:

* Subscribe to and personalize a podcast with software like iTunes;
* Select news segments selected from a variety of categories; and
* Automatically download the personalized podcast to your Apple TV, iPod or iPhone.

The custom news show could consist of a 5 minute segment from CNN on the day’s national news, a 5 minute segment from a local news station, and a 10 minute segment on sports highlights from ESPN.

Once you select the playlist of content that you’re interested in, Apple’s servers would request the latest podcast content from content creators, stitch the segments together and then deliver the personalized podcast to iTunes or other podcast software. As part of this process, Apple could insert targeted advertising dynamically.” – Apple Insider via Podcasting News

Hmmm. A listener in the states served by our networks could include one of our 4 minute state newscasts, a three minutes sports report and a farm report. That “stitching segments together” part is what I find intriguing. Terry Heaton wrote about the “unbundling” of media. Is this a “re-bundling” of media?

If I were programming a local radio station, I’d be damned sure I had a killer local newscast/podcast up on iTunes.

Cool Tattoos

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Cooltats
Thanks to a fascinating new technique you can cover yourself in body art and no one will be the wiser, unless they see you in the dark, which is the only time these tattoos are visible.

The new technique uses blacklight reactive ink, which is reactive to UV light. [The Cool Hunter]

Doc Searls: What’s Around the Bend?

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Doc Searls is on a panel (Public Media 2008) titled Technology and Trends: What’s Around the Bend? From his list of ten, here are three I found interesting:

  • Cell phones will be the new radios and televisions. This will start to happen in a big way the minute Apple opens its iPhones to independent developers of native applications (rather than just ones that run in a browser).
  • Websites will become as inadequate as transmitters. That is, both will remain necessary but insufficient means for reaching listeners and viewers, and for relating to them. “Live Web” methods such as streaming, file sharing, social networking and “rivers of news” will all play roles as well.
  • Archives will be the ultimate killer kontent. Stations and networks will come to value not only their own archives, but will work to make those archives as easy as possible to find, consume and otherwise use — and to open CRM systems for VRM tools to make it as easy as possible for listeners and viewers to voluntarily pay for the privilege. Bigger inventory, bigger income.

I couldn’t begin to guess the number of hours I’ve spent archiving material (I think Doc hates the term “content”). MissouriDeathRow.com; Legislature.com; Missouri Supreme Court oral arguments; and –once upon a time– Missouri State Highway Patrol accident reports. We saved damn near everything but I can’t say that I noticed a huge appetite for that archived material and I was never smart enough to make any serious money with it. But we’ve got it.

Candidate conference calls

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Dave Winer wants to listen to those daily conference calls the candidates have with reporters;

“It seems much of the real action in the campaign happens here, but we (voters, taxpayers, citizens) have no access. I listened to an MP3 of one of the calls, with the chief strategist and communications director of the Clinton campaign. It was fascinating, gave me a picture of how the press and the candidates relate that I had never seen before.”

A few years ago I asked one of our reporters to post the audio of one of these conference calls where a bunch of reporters are on with the news-maker.  She was shocked that I asked and explained that the call was “just for reporters” and they decided which portions were news-worthy. And the reporters would not want “just anyone” to hear their questions.

I’m with Mr. Winer. I’d love to hear these calls, raw and unedited. I’ll decide what’s news and what’s spin. No filtering, please. I have to wonder if some reporters might be concerned this could raise questions about their editorial judgment. What they decided to include in the story and what they left out. I fail to see how that could be a problem if their story ended with, “…you can listen to the entire conference call on our website.”