Op-ed
: The Star-Ledger asked me to write an op-ed about Dean and blogs post-Iowa (which seems like a month ago already, eh?). It's appearing in Sunday's paper. The text is below. I'll put up a link to the Ledger when it's up.
For those who've been reading this blog, much of it is a rehash meant for the nonbloggers still out there.
Click on "more" if you want to see it...
STAR-LEDGER: Sunday, Jan. 25
You've probably heard that Howard Dean built his amazing organization, war chest, and lead in the presidential campaign with the help of those magical, mystery things called "blogs."
And you've certainly heard that Howard Dean has now slipped like a greased banana on ice.
So did blogs hurt him or help him?
The answer, as you'd expect, is yes and no.
Blogs - short for "weblogs" - really aren't anything mysterious; they are merely web pages with updates and links. They serve many purposes. Some give us news (see Command-Post.org); some opinion (see KausFiles.com); some gossip (see Gawker.com); some even on-the-ground perspective from Iraq (see HealingIraq.com). Most blogs reach out into the Internet to share links and new perspectives; most are open and curious.
But the Dean campaign used blogs differently. Dean's blog (at BlogForAmerica.com) was less about links and content and more about the comments shared there by supporters. Those comments and conversation - and get-togethers organized through MeetUp.com - knit the Dean community.
Dean's blog built the organization. It mobilized the troops and motivated them to give big money. It brought together their enthusiasm and ideas (Dean bloggers suggested saving money by using volunteers' extra mobile-phone minutes). It made them feel involved.
It has been said that the blog allowed Dean to build his own third-party organization to take over the Democratic party. It remains to be seen whether that was true.
It also has been said that the blog turned the Dean campaign into a bottoms-up affair, able to hear the voice of the people. That we now know was wrong.
This was not a two-way street. When it comes to the substance of the campaign - to policy and public stances - the Dean blog was necessarily one-way and even propagandistic. That is not criticism. That's just the reality of politics. We don't want a president who shifts with the winds of polls or blog posts. We want a president who stands on principle. So the campaign had to use its blog to impart its principles to its supporters.
And the supporters, in turn, used the blog to defend those principles. Because the comments on the blog were open to all, Dean opponents - known as "trolls" - could come in and argue with Dean positions or just make cracks. The Dean supporters swarmed them like white cells on bacteria, making sure that the party line was not lost. Cleverly, they would vow to contribute more money every time a troll trolled; that silenced the snarks.
The net result was that the Dean blog became insular and self-affirming, amplifying the opinions and attitudes already there. Did the din inside become so loud that it became difficult to hear the noise outside, where the voters were?
Yes.
Well then, did Dean's enthusiastic supporters egg him on to be stronger against the war, louder against his opponents, nastier to Bush? Did they make him lose in Iowa?
No, it's not their fault. Dean is Dean. He is the boss and this was his loss.
On my own weblog at Buzzmachine.com, days before the Iowa caucuses, I said that Dean was losing because he had become Dr. No, leader of the negative wing of the Democratic party. He made this into a campaign about anger, about venting, even revenge.
But anger doesn't build the future. Venting doesn't create a leader. Revenge doesn't find a winner. All that does is make some people feel better, for awhile.
And the truth is: We are not all angry. Despite the way media and politicians treat us, we don't all live on the edges, in our red or blue states, facing each other across some new Mason-Dixon line of left vs. right.
We hear all the time how we are a nation divided. But we're not. We are a nation undecided.
Look at the large number of voters in Iowa who settled on whom to support just a week or even a day before the caucuses. They were looking for a leader to march in front of the positive wing of the party, to stand for something. That is why so many rejected Dean.
Weblogs - the citizens' weblogs outside the Dean tent - could have helped Dean avoid these pitfalls. For the true strength of weblogs is that their links bring you fresh information, diverse perspectives, and the real buzz of what the people are saying.
That is why the first response of those in power - in politics or media or business - should not necessarily be to write weblogs but instead to just sit down and read them. For the first time in centuries, weblogs have given citizens the power of the platform and the printing press. It is their turn to speak, and it is time for the powerful to listen.
In addition to using weblogs to organize his supporters - which his campaign did brilliantly - Dean should have used weblogs to listen to those who were not his supporters. If he had done that, he might have heard the drumbeats in Iowa in time to change. If it's not too late for him, he still can take away important lessons: not to be so harsh and negative, not to assume we're all living in a national funk, and certainly not to scream like a screech owl on speed in a concession speech.
Weblogs can indeed be magical. They can empower the people. They can change the world. But they can't win - or lose - an election.
Only candidates can do that.
Treo madness
: The Times magazine catches up to Treo madness with Gizmodo's Pete Rojas as its guide.
No feed, no read
: I find that if a blog doesn't have an RSS feed, I don't end up reading it.
It's the economy, stupid
: Tom Friedman gives us a bonus sixth part to his five-part series (confirming my suspicion that last week's was an Iowa special edition) with a simple message: The cure to the problem of the Middle East is jobs.
I was at Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley a few days ago, and they have this really amazing electronic global map that shows, with lights, how many people are using Google to search for knowledge. The region stretching from Morocco to the border of India had almost no lights. I attended a breakfast at Davos on the outsourcing of high-tech jobs from the U.S. and Europe to the developing world. There were Indian and Mexican businessmen there, and much talk about China. But not a word was spoken about outsourcing jobs to the Arab world. The context — infrastructure, productivity, education — just isn't there yet.
Iraq could be an economic showcase -- if it first becomes a democratic showcase and if it first becomes safe for investment. What we need is a carrot at the end of our stick: When the violence stops, the elections and the investment begin.
Simultaneous translation
: Can any sane person tell me what the f this means?
Howard Dean's bark was missing its bite. And his socks were missing their warp. Not to mention their woof.
If copy like that ever passed my desk, I would (a) demand a rewrite, (b) fire the person, (c) not run it. But then, I don't work
here.
Y'know, I've never hopped on the bandwagon trying to run over this writer but I'm running to catch up and jump on now.
If you're not interactive, you're deaf
: It pisses me off that I can't leave comments at CampaignDesk.org. This supposed watchdog on the press and the campaign calls coverage of the Dean Scream "cheap shots." I'd like to respond. But I can't. What are you afraid of, guys?
Bryan Keefer writes something that's nothing short of a Dean apologia, arguing that poor Howie was just trying to be heard above the roar of his eager supporters. Crap. He knew he was on TV. His rant was a coldly calculated move that backfired badly. He decided to come out looking not like a loser. And he ended up looking like a loser of another variety. And the voters and many a pundit and most comics and lotsa bloggers called it.
I would say that on CampaignDesk's site. But they don't want to hear from us.
The piece ends:
In the hermetically sealed world of campaign coverage, Dean's post-caucus speech is no longer just a speech -- it's a symptom.
Who's hermetically sealed?
Enemies networks
: I've had it with friend networks. I want an enemies network. Six degrees of enmity. You are whom you hate. I want to send email to people: I hate you, do you hate me? I want to see reverse-friend networks: Any enemy of yours is a friend of mine. I want an automated social system that tells my friends whom not to invite to the same party with me (henceforth known as the Gawker index). I want to make it a life's ambition to build a longer enemies list than Richard Nixon. I want to be mean again. Enough of this friend crap.
One-click campaigning
: Hats off to Amazon for creating one-click campaign contributions.
I hope they expand to local races.
FAQs here.
: I want to see more metadata (see the post below), for example: People who contribute to Howard Dean also buy Hey Ya!
Wide-open
: Well, the trends are clear according to the ARG tracking poll from Jan 19-21, 20-22, 21-23:
: Kerry: 27 - 31 - 34 - Up, up up.
: Edwards: 9 - 11- 13 - Up, up up.
: Dean: 22 - 18 - 15 - Pffffft.
: Clark: 19 - 20 - 19 - Yawn.
: Lieberman: 7 - 7- 6 - Oh, well.
Meanwhile, Newsweek says 52 percent of Americans don't want to re-elect Bush.
It's a wide-open race!
I believe this means that most Americans are just now waking up to the need to pay attention to all these other candidates. Our media made a Dean-Bush race a sure thing. Now we have to figure out what we think of Kerry and Edwards.
So things have not settled down yet, not by a long shot.
Wide-open.
The Scream Meme: Over already
: I've said it before: We are bulimiac culture. We binge and purge. We binge on pop-culture trends (reality shows, blooper shows, tabloid shows...) and then get it out of our system and move on. I think we binged on the Dean Scream and got it out of our system and now we're ready to move on. Some are complaining that we and our media paid too much attention to it; that's what we do. Binge. Then purge. The natural order of American life. Having purged, though, we look for the next thing. Is that next thing Kerry... or Edwards... or Dean?
Edwards, in the wings
: I keep reading that Edwards is great on the stump. David Brooks said it on Newshour [via Andrew Sullivan]. James Carville said it [via Josh Marshall, who thought he was moo shu -- tasty but didn't stick to the ribs]. Can he get enough attention to make it a three-way after New Hampshire? I plan to listen to his speech tonight, thanks to Chris Lydon.
Davos
: I wish there had been more blogging of the blogging panel at Davos. The panelists can't do it -- they're busy paneling -- so they should have invited a few bloggers. As I said yesterday: Invite bloggers and they will blog. And if you want to know what blogging's about, that's another reason to invite bloggers!
Nonetheless, a few of the panelists have put up notes: Ito, Le Meur, Rosen, plus an official PDF summary.
: The best thing I saw in that official summary came from Dr. Hubert Burda, head of a major German publishing/TV/online company:
Traditional media companies are also watching the rise of blogging with an interested but anxious eye – much as they did the emergence of the Internet a decade ago, noted Hubert Burda, Publisher and Chief Executive Officer, Hubert Burda Media, Germany. While many analysts doubt a profitable business model will ever be found for blogging, Burda disagreed. Most of the media trends predicted at events like the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum have proven to be wrong, he argued. “It’s like art – you can’t predict it. But if the audience is there, a business model will emerge. I’m sure of it.”
Dr. Burda is a smart man and a successful entrepreneurial publisher (he started
Focus, a great new news magazine) and a realist. I had lunch with him at Conde Nast (eat your heart out, Joi) and was impressed mostly with that realism. He has seen the highs and lows of online; he knows the limits of his business (he recognizes, for example, the difficulty of a German publisher entering the U.S. -- just ask G+J). So take his words seriously. He's no bubble businessman. He's a smart, experienced, successful, long-term business leader in media.
And so let's repeat what he says: "If the audience is there, a business model will emerge. I'm sure of it."
So am I.
: The summary also says that Orville Schell, dean of Berkeley's J-school, frets about the fragmentation of media.
I don't sweat that fret one bit. One-size-fits-all media is a false and temporary invention of (a) a three-network universe and (b) the one-paper town. The natural order of things in media is for the audience to find what it needs and wants rather than having one big brother dictate all. It doesn't mean we're suddenly uninformed; quite to the contrary, the happier we are with our media choices, the more informed we'll be. I've been saying this for 25 years:
The remote control and cable killed mass media like a volcanic eruption; the Internet is the forest that grows in the ashes.
Jay Rosen made a similar point at Davos (this is why he and I hit kismet so often):
Worries that blogs might undermine the news gathering and filtering role of the mainstream media also are
probably overblown, Rosen argued. By converting news consumers into producers, bloggers are simply reinventing the communication techniques of an earlier era, when a learned elite exchanged knowledge and opinion via private correspondence. Technology makes it possible to extend the same methods to a broad audience. “The age of the mass media is just that – an age,” Rosen said. “It doesn’t have to last forever.”
: Separately, Toronto Star publisher John Honderich says
newspapers are the last mass medium.
Segmentation
: Fred Wilson writes about audience segmentation -- a marketing need that is a technology business -- inspired by Seth Godin's discovery that you can look at Amazon and find out what kinds of things people who eat at Applebee's buy.
I dug deeper into that page and found, to my surprise, that the magazines Applebee's eaters buy are not what I'd expect -- Redbook, Parenting, The Star -- but instead Playboy, Maxim, Sports Illustrated, and FHM. I thought it was a family restaurant. This says it is a sports, guys' bar. I wonder where Applebee's advertises. (The obvious caveat is that the Amazon data could be based on a tiny sample.) For your amusement, also note that people who eat at Spark's -- scene of a notorious Mob murder -- have bought the book, 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.
This sort of targeting -- finding out where to reach your market and what they care about and how to speak to them and, ideally, how to listen to them and even enter a conversation with them -- is what will make weblogs and citizens' media a commercial success... eventually. For here, you don't just find out what words people searched for (the shallowest possible way to try to know a person) or what they bought (but just because I bought my kid a Barbie doesn't mean I care about Barbies!), you find out what people think -- not what some editor thinks but what the readers, the users, the market, the citizens, the people think.
We'll be on radio
: Remember to turn on your radio Sunday night at 9 for Chris Lydon's two-hour, live, call-in special Blogging of the President.
I'll be on, talking as fast as I type. Other guests I know of so far include Andrew Sullivan (the only man known to party with Drudge and Cho -- now that is metrosexual), Atrios (I wonder he'll speak through a kazoo so no one will recognize his voice), Josh Marshall, Gary Hart (now identified as a blogger), Richard Reeves, Frank Rich, Kevin Phillips, Republican strategist Max Fose. Wow. Details on the show here. Chris has a list of stations carrying the show here and will also list details of streaming.
: UPDATE: Longer list of stations here.
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