NORTH CAROLINA — Eight years since Howard Dean’s presidential run took the country by storm, how are the Internet and social media shaping the 2012 campaigns? How are campaigns and their supporters exploiting the latest advances—and what challenges do these trends pose for journalists?
For insights on these questions, I recently corresponded by email with Daniel Kreiss, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Kreiss’s forthcoming book, Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama, follows a group of young Internet staffers who met during the Dean campaign, created innovative online organizing practices, and later launched prominent political consulting firms that influenced other elections—including Obama’s 2008 bid for the presidency.
Kreiss is currently conducting ethnographic research on the campaign to defeat North Carolina’s Amendment One, which would constitutionally ban gay marriage, and is planning an interdisciplinary study of media production at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. An edited transcript of our exchange appears below.
As political campaigns move farther into the new media realm, they are increasingly finding ways to target their messages to individuals, rather than online destinations—what Romney adviser Zac Moffatt has called “remarketing.” What implications do these trends have for journalists’ responsibility to check the claims coming from campaigns, and for the media’s ability to shape the debate? Is there a risk traditional media will be cut out of the loop?
While the vast majority of campaign resources continue to be spent on traditional advertising, without question, the biggest area of growth this cycle is in online advertising. And it’s true that campaigns are increasingly leveraging multiple data sources to deliver targeted online advertising to individuals based on characteristics they share with other members of the electorate.
Traditionally, this targeting is checked by the ability of institutions such as the press to monitor the claims of candidates and keep them honest. Journalists, for instance, can monitor and publicize the attempt of candidates to promise different things to different voters.
I believe that journalists will continue to have both the ability and responsibility to play this role—but they will have to keep up with changing strategic communication tactics through innovations in coverage. ProPublica’s compiling of the targeted emails that the Obama campaign sends is a great example of how journalists can insert themselves into individualized information flows and open them to public scrutiny. There are also other opportunities. Crowd-sourcing the collection and analysis of the online advertising that individuals see, for instance, would advance our understanding of how campaigns target the electorate and help us discover patterns in strategic communications. Journalists can track the field efforts of campaigns, which use people as media to deliver targeted communications.
What has the coverage of the campaigns’ shift to the digital/social media world gotten right, and what has it gotten wrong?
The press coverage of digital and social media is much more sober in 2012 than it was in 2008, which is heartening. It seems as if journalists are settling in to exploring how new media is incorporated within institutionalized electoral politics, rather than looking at new media through the lens of the possibility for transformational change.
One growing area of coverage is attention to the privacy implications of political data, particularly in the context of delivering targeted media to individuals. A number of recent articles have advanced our knowledge of how this industry works, from Kate Kaye’s excellent work on online advertising to a spate of recent pieces that have explored data and targeting in the 2012 elections. The best journalistic accounts are measured and think critically about what campaigns and the consultants that serve them can actually do with this data and online advertising.
Although I am pleased by the admission that "we just do not know enough yet about these new media producers to say how they interact with one another and the paths their content travels," I am somewhat stunned that there is no concern over the looming government regulation of these very same new media producers.
I am not very smart and I saw it coming a decade ago.
Further, I am more than a little suspicious that a hunt for coordination will turn up -- coordination. Which strikes me as nothing more than fodder for the speech regulators and a terribly 20th c. concept in any case.
Sometimes there really is no story behind the story -- at least not one worth telling. And especially not one which presumes archaic motives and actors while strengthening antediluvian regulatory impulses.
#1 Posted by Jeff A. Taylor, CJR on Tue 24 Apr 2012 at 08:46 AM
Hey Jeff,
Thanks for weighing in.
I'm hoping Dan will look beyond just the ideological bloggers like the five who work for the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina and others who blog at Daily Kos. (Though I've seen real reporting on both.)
I was thinking more of the live streamers that took to the streets in New York with Occupy, in hopes of some eventual sponsorship or paid gig, or those who write for CLT Blog in Charlotte for the same purpose (as well as passion, as you mention in your linked post.)
I'd also hope that any government regulations on divulging blogger pay would first look at those who blog for 501(c)3s, which are getting tax breaks and calling themselves nonpartisan. IRS scrutiny on such organizations and their use of the word "nonpartisan" has also put obstacles in the way of new *news* nonprofits aiming to be nonpartisan in the traditional SPJ Ethics Code sense.
Of course, indie bloggers (and reporters!) still exist, and they go to the same conferences and support like-minded friends. That happens across the political spectrum. My hope is that the Kreiss research shows who's doing real *reporting* or coming up with new ideas, rather than just spinning off someone else's work with a great headline or spouting some talking points. We'll see what emerges.
Again, thanks for the comment.
#2 Posted by Andria Krewson, CJR on Tue 24 Apr 2012 at 09:35 PM