A giant change that has occurred is that people no longer go to a source and read/view what that source presents to them. I.e., on the web most people do not go to the Denver Post home page to then check all the stories the Post has listed. Instead most people come to individual stories via links from elsewhere and via Google searches. This is a significant difference in that it is no longer the Post pushing the stories but the user pulling what is of interest.
The other giant change is that when people are finding info of interest via links and searches, they tend to not even know who the source is in many cases, and definitely don't put much of a premium on where it came from. So a high listing on Google or links from a page many hit gives an article more credibility and impact than saying it was in the NY Times.
Winston Churchill started his books on WWII as soon as the war was over – because those who wrote first would define history's view of the war. A candidate needs to get their side out first, in detail, with links to supporting documentation. And post that in the various blogs, not just on their website. Because if they don't post first, others get to define the story.
This bears repeating – you will win or lose on the web based on two things, links and page rank. Links and page rank occur primarily from the quantity of quality posts about a candidate. And quality does not mean positive – it means a post that people view as credible and readable. This means the web is won or lost well before the final run up to the election. A candidate will be defined in the blogosphere and this definition will be based on a lot of data. This tends to be a definition that is virtually impossible to change because of the strength of that data. Everyone has their own conclusion from all that data, but it's amazing how much agreement there is across the spectrum.
For the skeptical, let's look at the coverage of Iran today. The MSM has basically been shut down in Iran. We are getting our news from Twitter, Facebook, & YouTube. It is the aggregated on sites like HuffPo & The Daily Dish. And what has happened to the quality and depth of the news? I think it's better as we are getting the raw feeds from everyone. We are each left to sift through the info, decide what to read/watch, and what level of credibility to give to each. That's a lot more work, but it also forces us to think more about what we are seeing. In the requirement to think, we learn more.
As to the worry that we do not have as good a foundation to weigh what we see – yep. But the professional reporters don't always get it right either. And when we all view and discuss and post and link on the stories, we learn from each other. And in that discussion we will many times, in the group effort, get a more accurate, and more nuanced picture. Watching Iran is the future of news, and I think it looks very promising.
Equally important, you will notice that outside of the MSM itself, there is no concern that not having reporters on the ground is a major problem. People are clearly comfortable with this new approach. This is the final death knell for newspapers – with no strong concern at their passing there is nothing left to counter the economic fact that newspapers cannot make a profit.
(Before you feel too bad for newspapers, keep in mind that they still, even now at death's door, are unwilling to try anything radically different. I proposed to two newspapers here that they run the interviews I do with politicians & candidates on their websites as they no longer do that. I was turned down because doing so "would require fact checking, editing, approval by the paper, etc." Even at death's door, changing the process is not open to consideration.)
The web has additional impact in that, just as newspapers would drive what hard news TV stations would do, the blogosphere now drives what the MSM does. The U.S. Attorney story hit the big time, and stayed there, because of Josh Marshall at TPM. I've seen phrases I first coined in the last election appear in the Denver area MSM 2 – 3 days later. There were times I wrote posts that were purposely aimed at just 4 people – all of them reporters.
I think this change is bringing about a significant beneficial change for our political system. Because credibility on the web comes from information. Yes a lot of it is slanted. Yes some of it is false. And there are a million opinions about what all that information means. And those opinions become part of the information. But think about it, that means we are discussing & evaluating candidates in depth. The day of a candidate who campaigns in trite vacuous sound bites is ending.
Next: What should a candidate do (bad news – it's harder, good news – it's a lot cheaper).
