The state of the media address
David Johnson January 24th, 2007
So last night, I’m watching the State of the Union, which is arguably the Superbowl of Washington press events, and I was absolutely blown away that more Web sites weren’t blowing out their coverage. Given that The Politico launched on the day of the speech with much advance buzz about being synergistic and reverse publishing and all that, there was absolutely nothing going on at their site. No forums, no live blog, nothing. But they weren’t alone. I breezed around and also peeked in at Slate and Salon among a few other sites and found the lights on and no one home. WaPost politics led with Howard Hunt’s obit. C’mon Webheads, when it is go time and the whole dial is focused on a single event, you have to be there too.
Long time LostRemoters may remember I’ve been on this kick before, blasting away on the old site at local papers’ and TV stations’ sites when their baseball teams are in the world series hunt.
Big time events need big time coverage, and online it has to be before, during and after the fact. And those big time events don’t have to be on the national stage, they can be hyperlocal too (nod to Rob Curley and the big/little J). We can do media marathons: Take a look at the Salt Lake Tribune where they are rocking Sundance coverage. You have to own your backyard. We all know this, but we still aren’t very good at handling live coverage of events in progress online.
Why? We know we’re an on-demand medium that is on all the time, but we don’t always act like it or even use it that way. I tend to blame the shovelware and the cycle. The networks are streaming their pipelines, live video or audio from the scene - shoveling the broadcast feed. We can move advance coverage and then our analysis stories — shoveling the print content. Instant analysis and interactivity are what we’re missing — original online journalism.
The State of the Union falls on some crowded turf, a local event with national attention where more media have jurisdiction than just about anywhere else in the country. While the networks did their usual thing on air and streamed it over to their sites, the niche papers on the Hill did nothing live on their own sites. A-List big media bloggers at the news magazines were marked A for absent. Tumbleweeds blew through forums and bulletin boards instead of expert opinions and user reactions being thoughtfully tendered by journalist moderators.
The SOTU has been called a useless and unnecessary ritual by some. So maybe I’m bent out of shape for nothing. But it seems that as the opening salvos are being fired in one of the most interesting election seasons in many years, a president with Watergate-era approval ratings addresses a freshly minted and changed congress, and the world is turning online for political news, we would have a perfect storm. Instead, we got a little squall. We know people surf while watching live TV, why didn’t more online editors craft companion coverage and build opportunities to engage users with meaningful resources and platforms?
The networks have their gets and pundits lined up for the big deals. If websites want to play in the bigs, they should be pulling their own gets and pundits into their forums and chatting it up there, where talking points can be drilled down into deeper wells bringing the chatter of broadcast and the depth of text together interactively. You want a round table? Stick a webcam on them and fire up the stream. Add in a chat producer and field questions from the rooms at the table. Use your CAR and database team to answer the glossy points with the realities and the hard numbers to take the spin factor away.
So maybe next time? If you did something excellent last night and I missed it, please, please, PLEASE blow your horn in the comments. Help me believe.
The Superbowl is coming. Indy, Chitown, I’ll be clicking in when the coin is tossed. I hope you wow them. The Oscars are right around the corner, too.
4 Comments Add your own
1. discreet_chaos | January 24th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
I agree that those with an audience or who can get access to one, should start thinking along these terms. Of course a lot of MSM were probably focused on their own coverage and the Pipeline shot of all those people and cameras in Statuary Hall sort of backs that up.
While on the other hand, there were a LOT of us on Wonkette and the event resulted in four comment threads with a total of 626 user comments. As someone who would occasionally jump into the fray, I’d have to say that logistically it was kind of difficult because the Gawker publishing system kept having problems and because so many of us were watching the bottom of the comment threads, we weren’t really seeing the stuff up top that was being posted by the official livebloggers.
Also and it may be because of problem with their publishing system, but the hosts jumped to a new thread a couple of times and at least twice, I found myself adding toward the bottom of a thread, while the official bloggers had taken it to a new post.
Right now and off the top of my head, I’ll say that liveblogging an event as high-profile as the SOTU is just about at that point, where multimedia switches from porn to the mainstream. There have been problems in the past, but they were fewer this time around, so next time enough of the kinks may be worked out that a network and another site might have a great example from which to build.
2. David Johnson | January 25th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
two good nods to very forward thinking in al’s morning meeting on poynter today:
quote
Yesterday, I mentioned the use of “tag clouds” as an interesting way to analyze speeches. MSNBC.com used tag clouds to cover the State of the Union address. I like the “transcript” and “analysis” tabs on the page too.
Alex Johnson at MSNBC.com told me:
We supplemented [the tag cloud] with video, and the cloud is generated in real time as the President progresses [through the speech], which is pretty cool because you can track the shifts of emphasis as he goes along. Plus we supplemented it with topic-by-topic analysis and reader interactivity.
Also, listen to this piece from NPR’s “Morning Edition,” which features several NPR correspondents commenting on the president’s speech in quick 15-second bursts. NPR also produced beat-specific “fact check” columns. Brilliant! It was not only useful, but it was a wonderful display of the depth of NPR’s reporting power and expertise.
/quote
very impressive, props to both msnbc and npr for these new approaches.
3. Moe Zilla | January 27th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Immediately after the address, this article got comments FAIR’s Norman Solomon, author of the new book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”
The interviewer ultimately argues FOR a bigger and better Vietnam Syndrome - “one in which the people, the press, the congress and even administrations become much more skeptical of the spin that is used to rush us into military action.”
4. Sophocles | January 12th, 2008 at 2:54 am
Nice
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