NewsTalk, BlogTalk: Post-Workshop Thoughts on the U.S. Elections

Categories » Workshop | The News about Networks 2

Introduction: Elections Analysis and New Media

Historically, the most reliable indications of likely voting behavior have been gained from demographics and polling. Attention also has been paid to news and media exposure - whether candidate coverage and commercials may be significant factors behind swaying the voter. Candidate communication strategies and media bias of one form or another remain the focus of critical study. Referenced in such popular books as The Tipping Point, the study of the changing facial expressions by TV news anchormen as they speak of the candidates stands out. Most recently, analysts are turning to the role of conversations. Inspired by the ignition of the grassroots by Howard Dean and moveon.org's “meet-up's,” the first articles about peer-to-peer voter decision-making are appearing. Conversations at house parties and other informal gatherings may turn a voter, though data are difficult to impossible to obtain. (For the purposes of analysis 'blogs' as well as discussion lists take the place of conversations.) In all, to create likely voter profiles, the leading election analysts now consider demographics, poll results, media exposure as well as loosely organized conversation.

Apart from the role of “meet-up's” in building voter bases, one of the questions raised by the Dean campaign and similarly styled efforts concerns the abiding significance of message discipline. “Micro-campaigning,” which encourages the rise of decentralized, 'open franchises' of quasi-organized support bases for the candidate, is modeled more after the bazaar than the cathedral. The (undisciplined) messages not only proliferate. More importantly, the messages also appear not to be centrally choreographed for the mainstream media. The intriguing assumption of the Dean campaign and subsequent initiatives along these lines has been that there are multiple, distinctive media spaces for campaign messages. Indeed, the Kerry and Bush campaigns have joined 'conversation space' and now blog every day. The question concerns whether the contributions by the campaigns are part of the conversation space, or whether the conversation space is having its own 'separate' conversations about the candidates. (See the piece by Valdis Krebs, "It's the Conversations, Stupid!"

New Media Terms: Comparing the resonance of candidate messages in the news and the blogsphere.

New media scholars employ terms such as 'packages', 'containers' and 'space' to convey certain units, sites and broader terrains of analysis. Packages may be collections of images and messages; containers are where they are stored; and spaces are demarcated collections of containers, such as the national newspapers, the major TV networks or a particular set of publications from the left. New media and democracy scholars, specializing in (election) issues, employ the notions of 'issue packages,' 'message containers' and 'media spaces.' The terms convey ideas about how campaigns are studied. In particular, “circulation” and “message repurposing” are studied. One tracks the movement of campaign issues, or the movement of a particular message, across sites. Multiple sites are considered 'spaces,' such as the 'news space' or the 'blog sphere'. Whose campaign's messages have more purchase in the news space and the blog space?

In new media the question of how 'well' a candidate is doing is thus a question of the circulation of a candidate's particular messages across media spaces. More specifically, a campaign is thus conceived of as a semantic and symbolic package that may or may not circulate intact across media spaces. The question concerns whether the candidates' packages are remaining in state or being transformed in different media spaces.

Once 'spoken' or 'released' the single message or a set of themes may take unexpected paths. The message may become garbled, as we used to say. It may become re-articulated or re-purposed. Indeed, it may not follow the campaign's desired trajectory, e.g., it is only picked up on rumor web sites. It may become fodder for the humorists and for late-night TV, as the 'Dean screech'. Importantly, once released, the message cannot be retrieved; it can only be 'spun'. New media scholars are able to chart the effectiveness of spin by similarly tracing the spin path, comparing the original message's path, with that of the spin. Did it follow the same path, thereby providing an indication of how well-spun the message has been?

In other words, as the messages move through media space, new media scholars follow the 'traces' of message movement. Borrowing language from hypertext theory, they speak of 'story traces organizing space'. Which space did the Dean screech organize? Did the spin organize the same media spaces as the original message? When a new media scholar asks such a question, he or she is asking more plainly, where was the story picked up, relative to the sites where it could have been picked up? Indeed, with 'data-scraping' devices, analytical tools and visualization software, he or she is likely to show you the story spaces, also over time.

It becomes especially engaging when scholars trace the circulation of different articulations of the same issue. The research has concerned the type of news space organized, for example, by North Korea and 'regime change', 'axis of evil', 'nuclear', 'war', 'famine', and 'reunification'. Analyzing the outputs of Google News (in English), which tracks and aggregates 4,500 news sources, one may chart how different angles to a story are being picked by different news sources. The map (pdf - 1mb - A3+ size) is a depiction of the news space around the issue of North Korea, analyzed in November 2003. One notices that U.S. media broadly shares the same space as the White House, covering North Korea and regime change, nuclear, war and axis of evil. Just as importantly, if you are reading stories about reunification, or reunification and famine, you are most likely not in the U.S.

Research

It is proposed to follow the candidates' issue and message packages in the news space and the blog space. The candidates' issue packages and messages may or may not be taken up by both spheres in equal measure or with the same degree of literal transfer.

The initial question concerns the presence or absence of the candidates' issue and message packages in the different spheres. How well a candidate is doing (from 'press sense' and 'blog sense' standpoints) may be gleaned from the extent of verbatim use of the candidates' packages in the respective spaces. We propose to watch the circulation of issue articulation, 'talking points' from the campaign and major speech fragments, and enquire into their relative uptake. We are interested not only in whether and how they resonate. We would also like to know whether resonance in the different spheres matters.

Indeed, we are interested in critically inquiring into the blog sphere, and ascertaining broader understandings of its significance. What is it for? For example, is it a conversation space unto itself, or is it better suited to measure the importance, significance and quality of news articles about issues? Is it in (successful) competition with the mainstream media, in the sense of being distinctive? Does it undertake what some are dubbing 'public journalism'? An evaluation of the blogsphere begins with an observation made by a particularly astute blogger, Rebecca Blood.

In my view, the journalism establishment isn't paying enough attention to the weblog universe. (…) Bloggers say what they think, giving reporters a window into the views of those outside the media. Bloggers often find angles that professional reporters have missed, or ask questions reporters have neglected to ask. And bloggers do amazing research. Professional journalists, often working under extreme time pressure, may not have time to research a piece as thoroughly as they would like. Bloggers have no externally imposed deadlines, and no mandate to research equally the claims of both sides. (…) When bloggers link to conflicting or contextualizing material, smart reporters will further research and verify promising leads, and credit the bloggers who uncovered them.

Third, and most importantly, we are interested in the interaction between the news space and the blog sphere, and the broader place assumed by the blog sphere in the elections. There are a series of questions.

a) Dependency questions. Do blogs depend on news? The question is the extent to which blogs are parasitic, pose an alternative to or 'replace' commercial media. This may be ascertained by the amount and type of references to news sources, also with regards to which collections of issues / candidates they cover.

b) A question of quality. News space studies are beginning to find that there are very few news writers, with the remaining news being a matter of copying and pasting. We are interested in whether this holds for the blog sphere. Do blogs talk about issues with more voices? Can we begin to create quality measures of the great conversation?

c) How political is the blogsphere? We seek to derive insights that allow us to characterize how the blogsphere is put to use. Is it more of a writing space, a news space, a political issue space? A subset of political weblogs is studied, relative to the overall blog sphere, with the goal of understanding the blog sphere's relative amount and quality of political content.

d) Blog dynamics relative to the news. We propose to monitor the reaction of the blog sphere to a news event surrounding a candidate. The analysis concerns a comparison of attention cycles as well as 'burst patterns'. This is a hype metric. Are blogs less prone to hype?

e) There is the larger question of who produces the news and the events. Is it the candidates or the bloggers who make news and events? When a candidate speaks about an issue, it may be a news event. Is it a blog event? Does the blog space express opinions about issues -- opinions about candidate speeches and other events about issue (politicization), or does it have its own world of 'events' proper. What is the quality of this world?

Fourth, an impression is often expressed that the candidates are 'close' on the issues, that perhaps there is not a great difference between at least the mainstream candidates. We are interested in how 'close' they are on the issues, not only absolutely (which is measurable) but also whether the substantive proximity is greater in terms of what they actually say, or how they are covered, both in the news as well as in the blog space. Perhaps the quality of the blog space lies in candidate differentiation.

- Richard Rogers, Amsterdam, July 2004