Politics
Could Campaign Finance Reform Benefit Journalism?
Posted on 16. Jun, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.
Absolutely, says Jay Hamilton, who argues that changes in campaign funding would bring untapped information to the public.
Earlier today we spoke with Hamilton, a Duke University economics professor and author of the book, “All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News,” who told us how campaign finance reform could open a new valve for news, especially as mainstream media coverage shrinks.
“If you think about the problem as people not having enough information about public affairs,” he says, “campaign finance laws further limit the amount of information we’re able to get.”
The idea behind tying campaign financing to journalism is that fewer funding restrictions would lead to an expanded role for campaigns to publish more useful content along with their own takes on current events. Increases in their allowed spending would, presumably, lead to more campaign members performing research, conducting surveys and aggregating news for the public’s use.
And while campaign ads, sites and infomercials don’t exactly scream journalism!, they certainly play a vital role in the broader information world. In his book Hamilton divides that world into four markets:
A market for producers — Information that helps you do your job. The majority of people who work on Wall Street read the Journal in some form. So do most business journalists.
A market for consumers — Information that lets you know the best places to eat, shop, visit and rent.
A market for entertainment audiences — Information that satisfies your personal interests. Or helps you forget about the economy for a little while.
And a market for voters — Information that allows you to make smarter electoral decisions. For example checking a campaign website to find out how your local assemblywoman voted on different bills.
“Today there are enough campaign organizations like MoveOn.org that have a journalistic function,” says Hamilton. “And the web makes it so much easier for people to examine information thoroughly.”
Of course the typical concern with a campaign or special interest group that provides information to the public is how certain political agendas come into play. Then again, that could easily be said about the blogosphere. As The New York Times reported a few months ago, a group of liberal bloggers have linked up with organized labor and MoveOn to form a new political action committee they are calling Accountability Now.
Perhaps journalism is coming full circle to the days of pamphleteers, when most of the country’s news was published by highly partisan printers. And if so, would the American public see a difference?
“The argument among opponents of campaign finance reform is that voters can’t process information well enough, that they are easily deceived by ads.” Hamilton says. “But I believe in the Web 2.0 world, where there is a new demand for political knowledge, the discussion should be reopened.”
Click here to read a Duke Magazine Q&A with Jay Hamilton on fact funding.
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Aggregation is Creation – Adrian Holovaty
Posted on 21. Jan, 2009 by David Cohn.
Last week I had the unique pleasure of spending some time at the Poynter Institute to discuss the future of journalism.
I also had the chance to catch up with Adrian Holovaty who, for many, needs no introduction. He is most known for pioneering Django, a model/view/controller framework to deploy web applications and then using that framework to create EveryBlock.com – a news feed for your block.
I asked Adrian only two questions. First – to explain a little known aspect of EveryBlock whereby the editors help explain some of the obscure aspects of city infrastructure. My take away: If you still have any doubt that aggregation is creation or that filtering is an editorial service that journalists can hone and use to make money….. you are missing a VERY lucrative bus.
The second was Adrian’s advice to a young journalist/programmer. Scratch your own itch.
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Rob Neppell – N.Z. Bear
Posted on 08. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
In 2002, I created the first blog ranking system, The TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem, and have been active in blogs and new media ever since.
I am the co-founder with Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds of Porkbusters, and spearheaded the “Secret Hold” effort which resulted in the passage of the historic Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act which will require that all federal spending be posted online in a searchable database accessible to all citizens. Resurrecting a key government transparency bill from oblivion, the Secret Hold campaign was one of the most successful and effective online activism efforts ever (and was also a lot of fun).
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Amanda Michael – OffTheBus.Net
Posted on 08. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
I currently work as the Project Director for OffTheBus, a new media collaboration between the Huffington Post and NewAssignment.Net. Previously I worked on Assignment Zero, and before that on political campaigns (Dean and Kerry) as well as at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. To the project I bring experience with online organizing and volunteer management.
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James Kotecki – Video Blogger, The Politico
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
I started in January 2007 making YouTube videos in my Georgetown dorm room with a $60 webcam and an aging Dell laptop. I rose to quasi-prominence by critiquing how the 2008 Presidential candidates were using YouTube. After getting a lot of mainstream coverage for this, I’ve since graduated, interviewed seven Presidential candidates, and covered the CNN/YouTube Democratic Debate and the Iowa Straw Poll. As of this week, I’ve been officially hired by Politico.com to video blog for them full-time. I’m very excited, because now I finally have a full-time job doing what I love – making goofy videos about politics and putting them online.
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Bill Allison – Sunlight Foundation
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism:
At the risk of adding to the nomenclature, we like to think of our projects as being “distributed research.” While the goal is to dig out information or link relevant information, much of which can be used to tell stories, we often leave the telling of stories to others.
Sunlight has started several distributed research projects to bring more transparency and accountability to Congress. Each project differs greatly; we’ll describe just a few here. Congresspedia, which we launched with the Center for Media and Democracy, is a wiki-based “citizen’s encyclopedia on Congress” that anyone can contribute to and edit (though we have an in-house editor to oversee it for fairness and accuracy). Our “Is Congress a Family Business” project provided citizen researchers with an online tool that guided them to online databases to look up information about spouses of House members (specifically, whether or not a spouse drew a paycheck from the member’s campaign committee), and enter their findings into the form. The tool both guided their research and collected their data, even displaying updated totals on the number of members checked and the number who had been tentatively identified as paying their spouses. We engaged citizen journalists an effort to find out which Senator had effectively blocked passage of S. 223, a bill that would require Senate campaigns to electronically file their contribution information with the Federal Election Commission (as House and presidential candidates already do); they called all 100 Senate offices in an effort to find out, and reported what they learned to us via comments on blog posts and emails. Finally, we have recently launched EarmarkWatch.org, a site that lets users connect the dots between lawmakers, lobbyists, campaign contributors and earmarks, plus share info and comments on whether earmarks meet pressing needs, pay off political contributors, or are simply pure pork. The site is at once an investigative tool for finding information on earmarks, a repository of that information, and a social networking site for those who want to bring transparency and accountability to congressional spending.
Additionally, we have provided grants to other organizations involved in citizen journalism, including Capitol News Connection for a project that would allow citizens to have their questions asked of lawmakers by CNC reporters; the Center for Independent Media to train citizen journalists and establish a Washington bureau to cover Congress; Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to create an Open Community Open Document Review System, enabling citizens to review and annotate documents obtained from the government through the Freedom of Information Act; and we’ve also supported both NewAssignment.net and the Center for Citizen Media. A full list of our grantees can be found at http://www.sunlightfoundation
What are your goals?
Our main goal is to bring transparency to Congress, and each project we do is designed to further that goal. Sometimes we are trying, explicitly, to answer a question (how many House members were paying their spouses from campaign funds in 2006; who has the secret hold on a transparency bill) that require the same steps to be repeated dozens or hundreds of times (calling Senate offices, looking up expenditure records for House campaigns). For other projects, the goal of aggregating the distributed research is secondary to the task at hand (scoring each member’s official Web site for transparency; evaluating the merits of individual earmarks), though we can still answer big questions (how many members post their schedules on their Web sites; how many earmark recipients lobby Congress).
What are some of your notable achievements?
Using the Web in innovative ways to make the distributed research process user friendly and even enjoyable: We launched “Congress’ Family Business” at 3:30 p.m. on a Friday of a holiday weekend, and expected the research to take three or four weeks. Within 40 hours, the project was completed—citizen journalists found that 19 spouses were paid by a member’s campaign committee in the 2006 election cycle, totaling more than $636,000. The amazing thing about the project was that our researchers found that doing the research was almost addictive. Most participants researched multiple members—anywhere from 10 to 100. And remember, this project involved searching through campaign committee expenditure reports—the sort of task that normally causes eyes to glaze over.
Designing research projects around available data sources: One of the most important things we do is to steer our volunteer muckrakers to reliable data sources they can use to find information for our projects, providing enough instructions to familiarize them with their use. Our hope is that by making them aware of these resources, they will check them again when they need government information in the future.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
We’ve learned a lot as we’ve gone along, largely through making mistakes. Our first effort in this field, after Sunlight broke the story of then-Speaker Dennis Hastert personally profiting from a $207 million earmark for a highway project, we asked our readers to investigate their own member’s personal financial disclosures, and let us know what they found. We had about 100 eager volunteers, but no way to train them and, except for email, no way to communicate with them. There was also no methodology, no set of questions we were trying to answer, just a suggestion that people take a peak at their lawmaker’s financial disclosure form and report back to us on anything that looked odd. While a lot of people did a lot of work looking, only one story emerged from it (and that one on the Web site of Harpers, as one of our citizen researchers tipped off a reporter there to what he had found). Our second effort, a 2006 project called Exposing Earmarks (conducted jointly with a coalition of other groups) similarly suffered from a lack of thought on the front end: While a lot of people looked at individual earmarks, there was no means of collecting and correlating that information at one site, so that we ended up with a scattered effort. Since that time, we have learned that there is no substitute for having a research tool that helps guide research and collect information. Our newest effort, EarmarkWatch.org, also allows for interaction among researchers–a research, publishing and social networking tool.
Are you getting revenue for this? How?
No, we don’t get revenue for this. The Sunlight Foundation is a 501(c)3.
What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
What we need most of all is more transparency from Congress! Beyond that, we’d like to develop means of distributing tasks like fact checking, we’d like to be able to create a network of volunteers who would take on more responsibility for running the projects we create. We’d also like to come up with more cool tools using data from other sources while allowing others to make tools using our data.
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Danny Glover – Air Congress
Posted on 04. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
My main contribution to citizen journalism thus far has been through AirCongress LLC, the publishing company I founded in November 2006. My Web site, AirCongress.com, serves as a portal to user-generated audio and video content of, by and about Congress. The goal is to give people interested primarily in federal policy issues and politics one convenient place to go for the latest news.
While I write the blog entries, the site really is driven by the content created by lawmakers, candidates, government agencies, advocacy groups, think tanks, media organizations and, last but not least, citizen journalists. I created the site to corral all of that great content into one place so it’s easier for people to access the best audio and video without visiting dozens of Web sites. Via the “Podcast Of The Week” and “Producer’s Picks” features, I narrow the content even further, using journalistic instincts honed over nearly 17 years in Washington to highlight the stories that strike me as most newsworthy and interesting.
I currently work full time as the editor of National Journal’s Technology Daily, and my work there prompted me to start Beltway Blogroll, a blog that tracks the impact of blogs on politics, policy and the media. I’ve been covering the citizen journalism world for a few years now and have spoken about the subject at various events.
What are your goals?
Ultimately, I hope to find a way to feature more citizen journalism on AirCongress. For instance, I envision bloggers from across the country interviewing their local congressmen or political candidates and contributing content to the site. I’d also like to use the site as a venue for getting future journalists (citizen or professional) some nuts-and-bolts experience in covering Washington.
I’ve had preliminary discussions with BlogTalkRadio about how AirCongress and BTR might work together, and I am eager to pursue content and/or business partnerships with innovators in the new media field.
Notable achievements?
AirCongress was one of the first Web sites to discover the “Big Brother” video aimed at Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and generated more than 10,000 hits in a single day. Linking to that viral video resulted in the biggest traffic day by far for the site, and searches for that ad continue to drive traffic to AirCongress.
And I just learned today (Sept. 25) that AirCongress was listed in the “influential blog index” that Adfero Group compiled for an August 2007 study on the impact of blogs on policy debates. The list of more than 150 blogs included neutral news sites like AirCongress, as well as blogs of various political leanings.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
I’ve learned that it’s next to impossible to start a media business on your own, in your spare time. I initially planned to make AirCongress a nonprofit hobby, soliciting contributions online and posting content sporadically. I did not envision it as a commercial enterprise with steady content until I approached a Web design company that nudged me in that direction. The company offered design and marketing services in exchange for a stake in the company.
Our negotiations ultimately did not result in a deal and I decided to hire another designer and keep the business “in the family.” I’m not yet to the point where I think that was a mistake — but I am wishing I could hire someone to promote AirCongress because it’s impossible for me to work a full-time job while also producing editorial content for AirCongress and promoting the site. For the business to achieve its potential, I need to find a way to get more people involved.
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Howard Weaver – McClatchy
Posted on 02. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Introduction and Narrative: Howard Weaver has been involved with the interactive efforts of newspapers for his entire adult life – the editorial pages. “Even in the old analog world there was a kind of interactivity, I think it’s natural to come to this stage where we have better tools to try and extend that umbrella,” says Weaver. Today, Weaver is vice president for news at the McClatchy Company, a publisher of 31 daily newspapers, 50 community papers and many more websites.
Recent examples of networked journalism at McClatchy include the recent acquisition of Fresno Famous (see writeup) and a part of the News & Observer in Raleigh North Carolina is a community site called the Share Triangle. McCaltchy’s networked journalism efforts can be as simple as an Alaskan paper asking for pictures of the biggest fish caught, to their upcoming ambitions to create a participatory journalism project through their DC bureau.
Main Goal: It’s a new space with the same goal, to practice community journalism. “Journalism that empowers people, creates better citizens to participate in a democracy,” says Weaver.
A Surprising Realization: I’ve been more surprised by the pace of change than by its direction,” says Weaver. “To me the basic imperatives have been clear for some time, but I feel like there is an accelerating pace.”
Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: The biggest thing we’ve learned is having an integrated news staff and not walling off the online staff from the print staff. In some places the staffs were literally in different buildings and now we are largely integrated and encouraging people to become more integrated, including content ad-sales and management. It is a big lesson not to think of the delivery medium, but trying to serve the customer – putting the information how the consumer wants it rather than how we produce it, says Weaver.
Money: To begin Weaver had a disclaimer: “The revenue side is not my area of expertise, I’m a news guy and always have been.”
According to Weaver, McClatchy is finding revenue models online and should have $180-200 million in online revenues this year. The company has investments in cars.com and Career Builder that are promising and while the initial opportunity was in the classified it is finding that retail online is growing quickly.
Future Goals: “We think of ourselves as a mission driven company,” says Weaver. The main goal will not change and it remains the future goals as well. “For 150 years we have been trying to make the communities where we serve better places, the animating principle is public service journalism.”
What do you hope to get from people attending this conference?
We are, like everybody else, between infancy and adolescents in this process. Its an opportunity to be exposed to a lot of ideas in a short time and meet a lot of people whose names I only know from reading their blogs.
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Micah Sifry – Personal Democracy Forum
Posted on 02. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Introduction and Narrative: Personal Democracy Forum is an annual conference and ongoing weblog that focuses on how technology is changing politics. Personal Democracy Forum was founded by Andrew Rasiej, who has a background in music, education nonprofits and advising politicians. Micah Sifry worked on the first conference and was soon taken on as a partner. Personal Democracy Forum does not have a political partisan bias, “we have a bias towards celebrating the most innovative uses of technology that open up the process and make it more participatory, accountable and transparent,” says Sifry.
Main Goal: To serve two communities that are colliding with each other: technologists who are interested in hacking politics and political hacks who realize that they have to understand how to adapt to and make better use of this new networked environment. Personal Democracy Forum is a space to help these groups better understand each others needs and potentials.
Notable Achievements: In January Personal Democracy Forum started another side blog – Tech President, that focused on how the candidates are using the web and how the web is using them. It recently won a Knight Batten Award. Personal Democracy Forum has also become “an interpreter for lots of mainstream news reporters that are trying to understand this arena,” says Sifry.
A Surprising Realization: “The thing that never ceases to amaze me is when you combine hypernetworks and search, the result again and again is that the right like-minded people find you,” says Sifry. Often the people that PDF hears from are exactly the people Sifry is looking for, “they have their own really interesting experiences and insights.”
Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: “I’m a great believer in always making new mistakes,” says Sirfy. As for the conferences, the biggest mistake has typically been over-programming. In running the organization as a whole it has probably been not knowing exactly where to focus, says Sifry. The lesson has been to only do a few things, but do them well.
Money: After four years the conference itself is modestly profitable and helps drive the editorial engine, though Rasiej who is the prime backer of the whole thing still has yet to recoup what he has put in.
While the editorial is running at a loss, Personal Democracy Forum does make a bit of money back in private consulting and hopes to eventually find a new revenue stream through content syndication.
Advertising is not looked at as a plausible model “I don’t think honestly there is enough demand for this kind of specialized content,” says Sifry.
Future Goals: “A partial answer to that, we own the URL techcongress.com.” But the main focus is on the yearly conference and based on the success of last year’s conference PDF is headed towards expanding it to a two day event with a third day unconference.
What do you hope to get from people attending this conference?
I’m interested in knowing where the cutting edge is in online journalism that effects politics. The media system is a more open and dynamic and whether that’s changing the political discourse is one big subject. There is a lot of possibility to open up the political process through the use of technology and more people participating in what their representative are up to, monitoring them, giving feedback. The question is, now that the media has opened up how citizen journalism can move in and add to the role of watchdog that was formerly done by corporate sponsored media.
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Derek Willis – Database Journalism at Washingtonpost.com
Posted on 02. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Introduction and Narrative: It was in graduate school at the University of Florida, studying journalism, when Willis found his passion with database journalism. He was taking a class of survey research, analyzing the results, which showed him how much information is already in a database or what could be construed as a database. What finally sealed his niche into database journalism was a conference of Investigative Reporters & Editors in 1994, “without the training and support they provide, I wouldn’t have the same career, they helped with classes and bootcamps in CAR (computer-assisted reporting). Willis worked at a paper in Florida and came to Washington in 1998 working at the congressional quarterly.
“If you are interested in data – the federal government is the largest producer of data there is, Washington is the place to work,” said Willis. After a brief stint at the Center for Public Integrity, Willis began working for the Washington Post newspaper only to move over to the website last February, stating that if you are working in database journalism the web is a better platform.
Main Goal: The basic philosophy for our information work is that there are a lot of databases that the public never sees the best or most useful versions of. Those versions are kept hidden for the people who use it or sell it. At the Washington Post online we try to put the best versions of a database in the public. What you see online is the best version we have, “we don’t hold anything back,” says Willis.
Recently the Post, for the first time, opened up a story on conditions in D.C. schools and published all of its data inviting people to dig into it and contact reporters with corrections or additions – things that we could never know about all the schools.
Notable Achievements: The schools project noted above is one of several database projects Willis has been a part of at the Post.
In another, the Post is tracking where the candidates have been and where they are going along the campaign trail – building a database of several thousand campaign appearances. Bloggers have used this to try and determine a candidates strategy, says Willis. “We ought to be able to know where the presidential candidates are going and we are building on the database, adding new features like speeches.
A Surprising Realization: You never know how other people will use your data.
That doesn’t happen very often in a print newsroom, but online pretty much every time you put up a data set you can be lead in any number of directions by readers.
If one person calls a newspaper reporter — doesn’t guarantee a response — for us — if we can do something and it can be a benefit to one person — its probably worth doing it. “I didn’t appreciate that aspect of it until it happened to us,” said Willis.
Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: What we really have not done as well as we could do, and are really working on, is a better visual component. There are things we have learned about the way you present info to people — it has to be done in a way that is accessible — not everyone is interested in the raw data.
Future Goals: We’d like to extend what we’ve been doing on a national level — down to the state and local level — there is no reason why our voter database should only be national.
I think the more — that we do in terms of putting information in people’s hands- – the closer it’s going to bring us into contact with people who want to do journalism whether they want to work with us or not. “It’s hard for me to see how getting more people involved is a bad thing for the news industry,” said Willis.
What do you hope to get from people attending this conference?
There are always going to be people who are experts on something specific. We need those people and journalism organizations need to know who those people are — so I like meeting those people.
I’m also interested in meeting anybody who is exploring in our area, to see if there are there ways that we can do things in different way.
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Rachel Sterne – GroundReport
Posted on 01. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Introduction and Narrative: GroundReport started as a side project for Rachel Sterne after reporting on the United Nations Security Council on events taking place in Darfur. Sterne, who worked for LimeWire at the time, was concerned and agitated by the lack of public awareness about these events. About one year ago GroundReport, a network of over 1,000 citizen journalists from around the world, went from being a side project to Sterne’s full time job.
Main Goal: To democratize the news in three ways.
1. GroundReport allows everyone to participate by posting articles, videos or livestreaming content.
2. The community decides what is on the front page through voting – there is no editorial control.
3. GroundReport shares revenue with all contributors based on traffic to their stories.
Notable Achievements: GroundReport has 1,000 different contributors from all over the world including Zimbabwe, Mali and Pakistan.
Using various tools, GroundReport has media offerings comparable to a large news outlet. GroundReport has its own television channel and will soon be launching GroundReport radio. GR Television allows listeners to become deeply involved in the programming and reporting of content for specific time slots.
A Surprising Realization: “I’m always surprised and happy about how passionate a lot of our users are and how they identify with the mission that we have,” says Sterne.
There is also the surprise of having to strictly define things. Sterne’s original motivation was to create an open forum, but she found a need to be more of an editor than originally intended “because people need to know what you are trying to create and if what they have is appropriate,” says Sterne.
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Jane Hamsher – FireDogLake
Posted on 28. Sep, 2007 by David Cohn.
Introduction and Narrative: FireDogLake is an unabashed liberal blog that started in the wake of the 2004 election. Jane Hamsher, a movie producer, created a simple blogspot blog to collect the posts she had written on her personal Daily Kos blog. “That was all it was supposed to be,” says Hamsher. Today, however, her blog is used “as a means to organize the left.” Over time FireDogLake picked up a strong audience, specifically around its coverage of the Plame Affair, which would later involve Scooter Libby.
As the blog picked up readers Hamsher added Christy Hardin Smith, a former legal prosecutor, and the two began doing traditional reporting. This included live-blogging the Scooter Libby trial from inside the courtroom with full press credentials. Online sponsors paid for travel and rent expenses, as FireDogLake continually provided coverage of the Scooter Libby trial.
Today FireDogLake has a team of close to 20 part-time bloggers in addition to Hamsher and Smith, who continue to do on-the-scene reporting. Hamsher also published a book with Vaster Media, a company she has in partnership with Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos. The book, “The Anatomy of Defeat,” was written by Marcy Wheeler, who did the actual liveblogging of the Libby trial. Today, FireDogLake pulls in between 80,000 to 100,000 readers a day according to Hamsher.
Main Goal of FireDogLake: To combine online organizing with media criticism, activism and original reporting. “We are trying to influence the political process, promote progressive values and candidates,” says Hamsher.
Notable Achievements: FireDogLake received huge accolades for their coverage of the Libby Trial. New York Times reporter Scott Shane noted “With no audio or video feed permitted, the Firedoglake “live blog” has offered the fullest, fastest public report available.” FireDogLake also raised $550,000 last election cycle and has produced commercials that were adapted by over thirty candidates for their district. FireDogLake also has a regular “Book Salon” where the blog gets behind a specific book, often driving it to the top of Amazon in 24 hours.
A Surprising Realization: When Hamsher first got involved in blogging it was on the Daily Kos community where she regularly argued with people in the comment section. “That was fun to me,” says Hamsher.
This continued on FireDogLake, but after it received a critical mass of readers people accused Hamsher of indulging in a power imbalance. “I didn’t recognize that things had changed,” says Hamsher, but as the head of the FireDogLake community, she learned that she could not engage people in the same manner that she could when she was a regular participant in the Daily Kos community.
Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: “That you can’t create the news — you have to stay responsive to it,” says Hamsher.
An example Hamsher gave on the day of our interview: (August 27th): Today a small headline is that a man, Kenneth Foster, is going to be put to death in Texas. “There is no way I can get anybody to pay attention to that,” says Hamsher. So FireDogLake has to work with what is already in the news cycle, shaping it and providing alternative interpretations. “We have to ride the news.”
Blogs don’t determine the news, but stay responsive to readers, they determine what they want to focus on.
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