Response for CH 3 and Talbot article

In chapter 3, Beckett looks at how Networked Journalism is changing political debate. The public is generally distrusting of political journalism as well as politicians. Not only that, but they are bored with the information mainstream news media produces. While civic engagement is still high in other niche areas such as human rights and environmental issues, the discourse involving political parties is tired. This leads to seeking out new sources for information, the easiest and most salient being blogs. He believes that Networked Journalism can eventual serve as a moderator to facilitate communication between the public and government, leading to more civic engagement.

Beckett believes that the Internet brings a complementary aspect to mainstream political journalism. Bloggers can supplement the mainstream with information and sources and also break stories that professional journalists either cannot due to censorship, lack of concrete sources, or political reasons such as in Zimbabwe. Bloggers can also force the hand of journalists by creating enough buzz around a story that they have to address it in some manner.

Will a happy medium begin to emerge once pro and am journalists learn to get along?

New media technologies allow for politicians to connect to the public in an unmediated way. Obama's campaign created their own YouTube channel (with 1,840 videos at this time) where they could post full speeches, commercials, rebuttals, and voter-generated videos, all of which could easily be spread to other areas of the Net. Mostly through social networking sites, e-mail, and blogs, though mainstream new sites also embedded them and even featured them on television news casts. The blending of new media and old media with the YouTube/CNN debates is both a success and a failure. I agree with Jarvis in the fact that CNN's editorial decisions were too much and that they chose questions mostly for the spectacle they would allow for. Most of the questions were ridiculously easy, almost boring. Here's the infamous snowman/global warming question.



Talbot's article supports a lot of what Beckett mentioned. He talks about how Obama was able to get unfiltered messages to the public through the Internet and that by building on Howard Dean's campaign strategies, he was able to build his own social networking empire through existing platforms such as Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, and Twitter, but also build his own in MyBO. His bottom up strategy counted on supporters spreading information for him. As far as the question Leslie posed as to how do campaigns reach supporters who may not be comfortable with online social networking, MyBO had an instructional video on how to use his site. I agree that the Clinton campaign was not smart in its use of new media. She embraced Facebook and Myspace, but never really used them to mobilize supporters. I don't buy the argument that her supporters were only women 40+, as I was a supporter of hers as were many young people on my campus in Indiana and at her rallies, but I digress. Here's the instructional video for MyBO. It's kind of bland to watch, but interesting in that you can see all of the features the site offered.