I spent the day at a conference on “Covering Politics in Cyberspace” put on by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. Basically, the idea of the conference was to get a group of around twenty five journalists together to discuss how they will be covering the 2008 election cycle. The concept for first day (today) was to bring in experts on online politics and political bloggers to talk to reporters about what they should be looking for. (more…)

The “Are Republicans Behind Online?” conversation produced another handful of posts today. David All started things back up with a column in the Politico. Mike Turk weighed in and then weighed in again with the thinking behind shutting down the RNC’s Team Leader program (which I helped build). Patrick Ruffini put in his two cents as did James Joyner (who coincidentally I watched on a panel today in LA.)

I think this topic is pretty well surrounded but have one miniscule point to make.

I don’t think social networking works at the national committee level. (more…)

I just spent a couple hours working on a project in which I had to identify the location of a couple of hundred news websites. This task was tougher than it should have been.

While many of the sites I visited are pretty and slick, I had a hard time figuring out where the TV or radio stations and newspapers are located, and that is why it is very important to note that people who visit a local news outlet’s site are not required to reside within its coverage area. Gasp!

Although pictures of the news team are important, words like “heartland” or “coast” don’t help people suss out the location of the local news. Further, most local news stories are written in a way that only those who are familiar with the local area would understand their geographical references. Also, using a station’s call sign rarely reveals where the outlet is located. Not all stations are lucky enough to have an obvious call sign like WNYC. The same goes for newspapers; there are many Tribunes, Gazettes, and Chronicles out there.

News site webmasters, please place your organization’s city or region and state in a prominent place throughout the site. For instance, “Hyattsville, Maryland (or MD)” or “Southern Utah” are very helpful descriptions. This will help people from anywhere who come across your site know where the news originates.

“It’s a big-picture site, for big-picture thinkers” according to Managing Editor Christopher Jones and although I’ve not been guilty of any big-picture thinking lately, I do like a big shiny picture on a web site’s home page as much as the next adult A-D-D sufferer. Portfolio.com has created an online magazine here that actually feels like a magazine. Not a magazine that you would ever have in your home, but an impulse purchase at the airport newsstand. You’re 2 hours early and it was this or Men’s Health again.

The site’s title is curious. Breaking Business News and Opinion is not how I would introduce the site. That moniker seems more suited for the cnn or msnbc crowd. Fair enough I suppose if they are referring to the Top 5 stories, but the traditional news services’ business pages update all day. These 5 stories have been here a day or two.

Now into the design of this thing, which was the point here.

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We've talked a good amount on this blog about the value of hyper-local and niche content in the media.  Mark Glaser from PBS Mediashift had a great post a couple of days ago talking about the value and difficulty of getting locally-based sites maintained by citizen journalists off the ground.  It definitely is not easy to get sites like these off the ground, as Mark notes that "journalism is hard work".  While the concept of having local citizens gather around a central online location to exchange locally-based news, events, comments, and opinions sounds like a great idea, many have tried this tactic and failed (Glaser refers to a couple of these sites in his post).  This got me thinking more about the role newspapers play in providing localized content.  Why reinvent the wheel?  Newspaper websites already have a few things that these new hyper local sites don't necessarily have: an audience and a platform.   This is part of the reason I believe that newspaper websites would be well-served to offer more localized content online.  Citizens can get national news anywhere.  They can only get local news from their local papers. 

PaidContent.org notes that localizing print content can be costly, and I believe it can be controversial, as well.  For example, a few weeks ago, I spent some time with some friends from Maine who were discussing the fact that a story about a mouse that stole an old man's dentures made the front page of the local paper.  While many people (reflected in the article's comments) thought that the story was a relief from the more typical depressing and nationally-focused headlines, others were upset by the fact that much "more important" things were going on in the world and the paper's editors decided to write about a denture-stealing-mouse.  

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Dagsbrun, an Icelandic publishing company, is launching free daily newspapers in 10 U.S. cities in the coming months, and blog content will make a significant portion of each issue.

According to a report from WBUR’s Curt Nickisch on today’s Morning Edition from NPR, BostonNOW — which starts circulation today — editor-in-chief John Wilpers plans to eventually allot half of his paper to content culled from local bloggers.

Including blog content in editorial content is a way to capture community opinion and provide an incentive for bloggers to produce content (they’ll get recognition from a well known organization) and to refer others to the outlet. “Hey, go look at my comments or pictures in the paper!”

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Following is the first paragraph or so of an email pitch I just got from an employee at one of the five largest PR firms in the world. I have liberally edited the email to protect the identity of the client, PR firm and specific person responsible. Changed stuff is in caps.

Hello,

I know that your blog is geared toward technology and general information. However [CAR COMPANY] has a program where they are [DOING GOOD THINGS]. Do you think that your readers would be intrested in learning about the program? If so you can insert the following infomation into a blogg.

What followed was a press release.

I don’t even know where to start.

• Three typos in one paragraph?
• Should people who can’t spell “blogg” really be paid to do “bloggger” outreach?
• Is The Bivings Report really about “general” information? I had no idea. Good to know.
• How does one “insert” a press release into a “blogg”?

The web is both a huge challenge and opportunity for practitioners of traditional public relations. As Mark Rose writes in this piece, “Big PR agencies are like super tankers; they are set on their course and they take a super effort to navigate a new direction.”

By the time some of these mammoth firms figure things out we’ll have all already moved on to the next thing.

Check out the Bad Pitch Blog for more stuff like this.

Update: The issue with the Digg buttons I describe below has been fixed on the Romney blog (it was fixed within two hours of my post). I could be wrong, but I suspect that means the campaign is watching blogs pretty closely, unlike the McCain folks who took weeks to fix a similar problem.  Original post is below.

I was completely offline for three days and have been catching up on all my feeds and stuff today. One of the posts that caught my attention was David All’s breakdown of some new media efforts being undertaken by the Mitt Romney campaign.

So I went to check out Five Brothers, which is the name of a new Romney campaign blog written by his wife and five sons. I like the blog but I think they’ve made a mistake in the way they installed the hip Digg This buttons on the site.

If you visit the blog, you’ll see the little Digg icons next to every article. Strangely, every story has the exact same number of Diggs - 15. After a little investigation, it appears to me that a mistake was made in implementing the Digg javascript. It appears that every single Digg button on the Romney blog submits the blog as a whole instead of the specific blog posts(which is the norm). The mistake even appears on the permalink pages.

This essentially renders the digg function useless, as the main blog was submitted three days ago so is no longer in the Digg queue (meaning it isn’t going to make the homepage).

Team Romney has been up to some interesting stuff the last few weeks. But they might want to fix those Digg buttons.

My Stuff is a new ImpactWatch™ feature that enables individual users to save stories in the system that are pertinent to them.  To do this each story is listed with an icon that saves the item in a place where they collect articles.  Further, it uses AJAX so that saving items is a smooth process that doesn't involve multiple web pages.

Visit the ImpactWatch™ site to learn more about the program.  We also offer a free demo that features analysis of media coverage about the launch of the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 and provide case studies about how ImpactWatch can help any organization manage its public relations.

Click on the picture for a video demo of My Stuff. 

MediaPost reports that USAToday.com's redesign to include many social networking features has paid off.  In article, Gavin O'Malley reports:

USA TODAY'S COMMUNITY-CENTRIC MAKEOVER LAST month appears to be paying off in dividends. Indeed, the site has seen a dramatic 380% increase in registrations since the re-launch, while its unique visitor rates have grown 21% from February, according to Nielsen//NetRatings…Sections seeing particularly strong traffic gains include Sports, Money, Travel and Tech, according to Gannett's internal measurements.

This seems to make sense since social networking features can have stickiness potential.  Site visitors want to come back and debate a story on the site with others, blog about a variety of subjects, or share their point of view via several different types of media.  It is also interesting to note that the sports, money, travel, and tech sections are showing great growth; this is perhaps because people tend to have lasting hobbies and interests in these topics.  Further, they could also urge their friends to go on to such sites to see their work.

It is also interesting to note that the sports, money, travel, and tech sections are showing great growth; this is perhaps because people tend to have lasting hobbies and interests in these topics.

It is nice to see that USA Today is having some success in social networking.

Representative Chris Cannon, a Republican from Utah's 3rd Congressional District, is an unlikely Internet maverick, but he shattered such notions yesterday morning in Salt Lake City at the first ever ForumNext.

In conjunction with Politic2.0, a new Utah based web 2.0 startup, Cannon participated in a rather unique quasi-virtual town hall with several bloggers (only about half who focus on politics) and journalists.  Bloggers submitted questions in a digg-like system so that others could vote and comment on them; the most popular questions — covering a wide range of topics — were asked.

The bloggers attending the event in person were able to clarify their questions and ask follow-ups as Cannon responded.  He definitely was on his toes, and that may explain why he jokingly quipped before questioning commenced, "If we have embarrassing questions, we'll have technical problems, right?"

However, despite a few glitches, things went rather smoothly, even for Cannon. (more…)

Click on the left image to see the before and the right to see the after.

Sounds like a stirring movie, but it isn’t, thank God. It’s the title of my design review of John Edwards campaign site update. I was puzzled by the lack of Edward’s face on the last version of this site, and I thought the overall tone was rather grim. Not John McCain grim, but pretty sullen. Since that initial launch, Edwards has gotten a lot of publicity that really has nothing to do with his campaign. The Ann Coulter weirdness and the announcement of his wife’s medical condition took center stage. Upon viewing his site last week, I was pleasantly surprised to see a much more inviting and energetic offering from his camp.

I still have to shoot past that splash page, but only once and I’m going to let that one go since clearly he isn’t. In the main site what was once a duotone wall of healthcare opinions and stats is now a vibrant interface that is only mildly annoying. The main real estate on the page is taken up with a huge scrolling image of: John at a rally, John at a rally again, Global Warming Action Month, a shot of John appearing to preach in a field perhaps and John with Elizabeth saying thanks for the support and concern. Then a few more flags and rallies and a big Stop The War message. Okay, no one but me will have gone through them all, but they’re a big improvement over the static message from the last design effort.

The Action Items (yeah, I said it) are now much easier to get through. The last version held them in tedious fields of solid red and blue, and along with the stagnant nature of the page, they were passed over pretty quickly. The new version just does it better. The colors are brighter, no elements are reversed out, and Spread The Word has been replaced with a Grassroots invite that at least seems more interesting. Not interesting enough for me to click on, but I’m a worst-case scenario.

Below all of this are included more images to break up the content of the page and a link to send John and Elizabeth a note. It’s a nice touch and even I click through. The thank you note that starts the page is elegantly written and thankfully the picture of John lightens the mood as he is orange here for some reason.

Overall the redesign of the site, mild though it is, really works in my opinion and the site is now on par with the better presidential campaign sites.

Click here for the old boring version of the site.

Click here for the thrilling new version.

On April 7th, 2008 Republican Presidential candidate John McCain published an op-ed about the Iraq war in the Washington Post. That same day, Fred Thompson, who is considering his own Presidential run, wrote a blog post about Iran on Red State, a conservative blog community.

Two very different approaches. One aimed clearly at the Washington elite. The other aimed just as clearly at the Republican base online.

Which worked better?

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Yesterday, seven major presidential hopefuls participated in an on-line town hall meeting about Iraq hosted by the left-leaning MoveOn organization where members of the site "gathered in over 1,000 living rooms, bars, libraries and back yards" all over the country.  Of the wide presidential field MoveOn members invited 12 candidates that represent both major parties, but only John Edwards, Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, and Barack Obama (all Democrats, as NPR noted yesterday) participated.

It is not surprising that GOP politicos didn't participated since MoveOn has openly labeled itself as a progressive organization, but it makes one wonder why there isn't an active conservative on-line community like MoveOn that can host Republican friendly events.  On Sunday Todd chimed in on Matt Stoller's thoughts that he posted to the liberal watering hole MyDD that effective conservative Internet usage lags behind liberals' digital ventures, and yesterday serves as further evidence of Stoller's assertions. 

More importantly, sites and social networks like MoveOn aren't run by the Democratic Party, but the party has many supporters who do start and manage sites to rally others.  Perhaps the Republican Party should try to foster more on-line grassroots activity so that conservatives have more channels to bolster the party.

It is also important to note that the conservatives don't have to counter citizens in liberal forums — like MoveOn — although that would prove interesting, but they must explicitly reach out so that they seem accessible and open to input from the normal folk that they aim to lead.  However, if liberals expect Republicans to engage in town hall meetings in left-leaning venues, they have to allow Democrats to do the same — like participating in a presidential debate hosted by Fox News.  They're not, and that makes it ridiculous for liberals to expect Republicans to participate in meetings like that of yesterday.

Washington Post website redesigned as a wiki?

A Japan-based design firm has redesigned the Post in the wiki style. Interesting. Reminds me of a stripped down version of the current New York Times website. <Via Martin Stabe>

Wikis, Indexes, Context, and the News

Amy Graham from the Poynter Institute writes about how wikis might be used by the news media: “They could play a valuable role not just in supplying engagement and context, but in helping communities and news pros collaborate to create a less fragmented view of what’s happening, what came before, what might come next, and how it all matters and interrelates.” <Via Cybersoc>

European papers optimistic on future — with web’s help

Europeans seem a bit more optimistic about the future of newspapers than their American counterparts. I’m still waiting for the day someone really smart buys a local U.S. paper and reinvents it online. <Via Techdirt>