Bruni asks “Who Needs Reporters?” and highlights how Michele Bachmann used a YouTube video to announce she wouldn’t seek re-election, that Anthony Weiner had taken the same route to announce that he was seeking election, and that Hillary Clinton had announced her support for gay marriage in a web video. In all cases, the politician in question clearly avoided potentially problematic questions from journalists by using YouTube to make newsworthy announcements. He writes:

“[reporters] role and relevance are arguably even more imperiled by politicians’ ability, in this newly wired world of ours, to go around us and present themselves in packages that we can’t simultaneously unwrap. To get a message out, they don’t have to beseech a network’s indulgence. They don’t have to rely on a newspaper’s attention. The Bachmann, Weiner and Clinton videos are especially vivid examples of that, reflections and harbingers of an era in which YouTube is the public square, and the fourth estate is a borderline obsolescent one.”

He is arguably right to worry about the diminished importance of professional journalism overall (though the end of journalists as the main gatekeepers between news and the wider population is far from only a bad thing).
But is he right to argue that politicians as a class can circumvent the news media (and paid media, i.e., television advertising) and speak directly to the people via YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter? (Even if they could, it wouldn’t really be “direct”, just through new digital intermediaries with their own biases etc.)

Together with my colleague, Cristian Vaccari, I’ve been investigating this question in a more systematic way, looking not only at extreme outliers like Bachmann, Weiner, and Clinton, who all command outsize attention both amongst journalists and on various social media platforms, but also more ordinary politicians.

In a piece of research I’ve already blogged about, we show how the vast majority of congressional candidates, even in competitive, high-stakes, well-funded races, actually reach only a miniscule audience via their various social media profiles. They don’t, in Bruni’s words, have to rely on a newspaper’s attention, for the role of newspapers in the American media landscape is eroding and many other channels are available. But they certainly cannot rely on social media to reach people either, for most people do not follow most politicians online.

Here is the paper we’ve written on the huge variations in how much attention different candidates draw (abstract below), and here is the paper we have written trying to explain the variation.

Do People ‘Like’ Candidates on Facebook? Not Really — From Direct to Indirect and Institutional Effects of Social Media in Politics.

The online popularity of a few exceptional candidates has led many to suggest that social media have given politicians powerful ways of communicating directly with voters. In this paper, we examine whether this is happening on a significant scale and show, based on analysis of 224 candidates involved in competitive races in the 2010 U.S. congressional elections, that the majority of politicians online are in fact largely ignored by the electorate. Citizens’ attention to candidates online approximates power law distributions, with a few drawing many followers while most languish in obscurity. We therefore suggest that the political implications of social media are generally better understood in terms of facilitating indirect communication and institutional change than in terms of direct communication.

Direct communication with the electorate is not what most politicians use social media for (more for influencing the news cycle, connecting with supporters to raise money and mobilize volunteers). Most politicians cannot rely on social media alone to reach voters because people do not seek them out on these “pull” platforms driven by interest. Therefore, campaigns still have to rely on “push” media including ”earned media” (news coverage), television advertising, direct mail, online advertising, and field campaigns with volunteers and paid workers going door to door or hitting the phones.

It was a very rewarding day with many interesting discussions and presentations by campaign staffers, consultants, lawyers, and others who had been involved in the 2012 campaign cycle.

It’s often hard to follow what’s actually going on this space without speaking to those involved because, as Lois Beckett from ProPublica, who is among the few journalists who have covered this area, “many campaign people lie to journalists about micro targeting and data use”. So, with that warning and caveat, a few take-aways from a rich day—

Where are well-resourced US campaigns at in terms of using data? As Rayid Ghani (Chief Scientist, Obama for America) reminded us, data-based modeling is probabilistic and mostly aimed at about marginal improvements in how resources are allocated for messaging, mobilization, fundraising, etc. It’s not a magic bullet, not necessarily as powerful or nebulous as some would suggest, and generally not as developed as the use of behavioral modeling is in much of the corporate world.

Ghani explained that big data-based modeling is hard to do in politics because of the low frequency of the behavior you are trying to model (voting, for example, is not someone we do that often) and because the context is important and can change dramatically from election to election (2004 versus 2008 etc). Targeting is–and several speakers, including Carol Davidsen from Obama for America as well as Alex Lundry and Brent McGoldrick who were both involved in the Romney campaign in various roles, underlined this–certainly getting better and better in terms of predicting people’s political behavior, but it remains probabilistic, and this is too often overlooked and/or misunderstood in public discussions surrounding the use of data by campaigns.

Modeling is also hard because though much data is available in the US after more than a decade of database-building, by the standards of computer scientists, it not much. As Ghani put it—and he worked for Obama—“this is the smallest dataset I’ve worked with.” In insurance, banking, health, and many areas of marketing, the datasets are much bigger and more detailed. (And one can easily imagine why—the resources available in those sectors are bigger than even the biggest political campaigns, let alone more ordinary campaigns for Congress etc.)

Right now, campaigns still focus on modeling people’s (a) propensity to vote and (b) their likelihood of supporting one or another candidate. Ghani suggested that in the future, there will be more focus on modeling “persuadability”, in predicting not only how are people likely to behave, but also how likely they are to be susceptible to specific kinds of communication from campaigns.

It will also, and this is something in particular Carol Davidsen (Director, Integration and Media Targeting, Obama for America) talked about, increasingly work across platforms and in the future increasingly focus on evaluating the impact of the massive amounts of money spend on television advertising, an area that several campaign staffers and consultants underlined remains the biggest line item in campaign budgets, and also the least accountable and the least data-based activity. Data from set-top boxes, the rise of IPTV, etc may change that in the future. Integration is the watchword here.

Before getting carried away in discussions of how new digital sources of data from television, from social media, from cookies across the web etc, it is important to remember, as Eithan Hersh made clear in his very good talk, that “campaign targeting is largely a function of public data availability” (and of course what Alex Lundry called the “solid gold” of volunteer or paid canvassing/phonebank-generated IDs, the “who do you lean towards voting for”-type questions asked at the door and over the phone by field campaigns).

In terms of public data availability there are interesting cross-national differences between the US and for example the European Union, which has adopted a “comprehensive” approach to data protection and has privileged privacy protection and where much of the information that enable “big data”-based microtargeting in American politics is simply not available. (Eithan was foreshadowing his forthcoming book Hacking the Electorate, which I’m very much looking forward to.)

The reliance on public records makes the use of data by political campaigns very susceptible to regulation and challenge the stance of some speakers—that the rise of these tools is “a force of nature” that we simply have to adapt to—and make clear that there are political choices to be made here.

In summary, the conference (tons of tweets under the hashtag #datapolitics with other people’s thoughts and observations) provided much information about what campaigns are actually doing today and what the main contemporary legal and political issues surrounding these practices are, but also underlined that

(1) fully articulated, cutting edge big-data modeling remains far more widespread and developed in the corporate world and parts of government than in the political world and

(2) is obviously linked to the resources (time, money, expertise) available to individual campaigns, so the 2012 Obama campaign was ahead of the 2012 Romney campaign, all other US campaigns are far less sophisticated than either, and most campaigns in most other countries (where there is less money in electoral politics and often less public data available) are even less sophisticated.

Is democracy then being “data-crunched”? There was no consensus in the room. Big data and increasingly sophisticated analysis help campaigns allocate their resources more effectively, have enabled them to expand and refine their persuasion but also–importantly– their mobilization efforts, arguably increasing both volunteer participation and voter turnout. It has also increased the risk of electoral red-lining, more fragmented public debates and segmented campaign communications, and strengthened the hand of resource-rich incumbents relative to those with fewer resources (including insurgent campaigns as well as individual citizens).

UPDATE–nice piece on the NYT bits blog summarizing a talk by Kate Crawford outlining “six myths of Big Data”.

Much of the discussion of Genachowski’s legacy has focused on what the FCC did and didn’t do during his tenure on important core issues like internet access and mobile service, as well as questions concerning the commission’s overall regulatory authority in an increasingly convergent media sector.

What about journalism? This is not a core concern for the FCC, but it is important, and with the publication in 2011 of the “Information Needs of Communities”-report, Genachowski at least raised the possibility that the commission would seek to play some role in addressing the democratic challenges that arise from the wrenching transformation that the news industry—newspapers in particular—is undergoing in the United States.

Especially since 2007, the combination of economic pressures and technological change has severely challenged the business models that used to sustain journalism in the United States. Especially local, metropolitan, and state-level issues are in many places no longer covered in ways that ensure people can keep track of public affairs in their community.

The implications are potentially dire—as Paul Starr has put it, it may well be “goodbye to the age of newspapers, hello to a new era of corruption.”

The “Information Needs of Communities”-report recognized the challenges this transformation in the news industry represent for American democracy, and though it did not present major policy initiatives to address the issue, it did make a number of minor recommendations.

Little has been done, however, to act on these recommendations, and there are no signs that the fundamental challenges—of how to serve, in the future, the democratic information needs of communities—have been met.

Here is how the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism summarizes developments in the news industry since the publication in 2011 of the “Information Needs of Communities”-report—

In 2012, a continued erosion of news reporting resources converged with growing opportunities for those in politics, government agencies, companies and others to take their messages directly to the public.

Signs of the shrinking reporting power are documented throughout this year’s report. Estimates for newspaper newsroom cutbacks in 2012 put the industry down 30% since its peak in 2000 and below 40,000 full-time professional employees for the first time since 1978.

[…] This adds up to a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands. And findings from our new public opinion survey released in this report reveal that the public is taking notice. Nearly one-third of the respondents (31%) have deserted a news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to.

The problems that prompted the “Information Needs of Communities”-report have not gone away. In fact, in many respects, they are only growing worse. Even as digital technologies empower us in many ways as citizens and consumers, the news that help us act as such is rapidly eroding in many parts of the United States. The possibility that the FCC would seek to play some constructive role in addressing this  problem remains, almost two years after the report came out, at best that—a possibility.

Public policy initiatives in general and the FCC in particular cannot make the challenges that news media organizations and journalism face go away. But policy initiatives can help the news industry and the journalistic profession address these challenges and make the most of the new opportunities that present themselves to ensure that communities across American have access to the information that they need to engage in democratic self-governance.

In terms of doing so, Genachowski leaves no real legacy. The “Information Needs of Communities”-report published under his tenure documented many of the problems at hand. Let’s hope the next FCC chair will start looking for ways of addressing them.

I wrote this Thursday morning European time, between then and the publication on the HuffPo site, several other people have written interesting stuff on the same issue, including Ken Doctor at the Nieman Labs blog and Andrew Beaujon at Poynter.

Also, now the Wall Street Journal reports that the New York Times Company has already received a formal bid valuing the Globe at more than $100 million. It will be interesting to follow what happens.

The 2012 elections have clearly shown that the resurgence of “personalized political communication” I analyze in the book has continued. Even after the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision unleashed a wave of outside spending going primarily into television advertising, the two major parties and most candidate campaigns engaged in competitive elections still invest heavily in the ground game.

We don’t have the National Election Studies numbers yet, but pre-election day surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press suggests that even before the intense final days, about as many people had been contacted in person as in 2008. The final number is likely to be higher, as the Obama campaign pursued an equally aggressive ground game and the Romney campaign built a far bigger field operation than McCain had in 2008 (though they also learned the hard way it is not only about quantity, but also about quality).

As I argue in the book, the resurgence of seemingly old-fashioned forms of political communication like door-to-door canvassing and phone banking is driven by a particular combination of media factors and political factors.

• In terms of media factors, American campaigns face an increasingly fragmented and oversaturated media environment that undermines the effectiveness of inherited forms of mass media communication based on PR and advertising.
• In terms of political factors, they operate in an environment characterized by a particular combination of partisan polarization and low turnout that puts an emphasis on mobilization over persuasion.

These factors, combined with the development of technologies that afford ever more precise targeting of individual voters, fuel the resurgence of the ground war—as they have over the last decade.

Much more research is needed, however, to understand this phenomenon (and its political and democratic implications). I’d point to just four areas I think are particularly important to examine at this point—

1. What are the major differences in how Democratic and Republican campaigns approach ground wars, and how do we explain these differences? Currently, Obama’s campaigns set the standard, but in the 2000s, Bush’s campaigns were superior to his rivals’. (Is a starting point what Dave Karpf has called “outparty innovation incentives”?)
2. How do we understand, especially after the “Citizens United”-decision, the formal and informal collaborations between candidate campaigns, party organizations, political action committees, and other entities like data vendors and consultancy companies? (See here the growing body of work on parties as networks.)
3. What are we to make of the often rapid, always hyped, but also sometimes error-prone and problematic, development of new technologies for managing field operations, for integrating different layers of political communication (from mail over TV to a knock on the door) and (especially) for targeting voter contacts? (Daniel Kreiss has written the book on how different players in and around the Democratic Party developed their tools, but more is needed.)
4. How are ground wars (the term is a very American one, hence the more academic “personalized political communication”) developing in other countries, including for example Western European democracies where partisan polarization is less pronounced and turnout higher? (Some work exists on constituency campaigning in the UK, but there is little comparative work on the organization and impact of these forms of political communication.)

My book is only a first step towards understanding the resurgence of seemingly old-fashioned forms of political communication like canvassing and phone banking. All of these areas call for more work, and I hope more researchers will engage with these issues.

I look forward to continuing that effort in 2013, and just want to thank here those who have engaged in it and facilitated it in 2012—from my book launch at the Rothermere American Institute in Oxford a year ago over another twenty-three talks in six countries in the course of the last twelve months and several moderated online debates about the book, I’m grateful to everyone who hosted me, to everyone who showed up to hear about the book and talk about, and of course to those who’ve read it, emailed me about it, and reviewed it.

I’m from Denmark myself and claim no special insight in the qualitative dimensions of Finnish journalism. But looking at the institutional pre-conditions for journalism in place across the Nordic countries, my view is the region is blessed with some of the best media in the world in terms of (a) their capacity to produce news, (b) the diversity of provision, and (c) the reach and dissemination of news across the entire population. Things are not perfect, but they are in a comparatively good shape, an argument I’ve also made about the situation in Denmark.

They are also about to change, because the economic models, political compromises, and forms of journalistic practice that define the model are all under pressure. Beyond issues over journalistic quality (diversely defined, but generally in opposition to “churnalism” and mindless chasing of minor breaking news-items with very limited shelf-life) the current generation face at least a three-fold challenge to ensure that Nordic media of tomorrow are as good as, if not better than, the ones of today.

1) Can historically successful and diversified newspaper companies manage the transition to a new media environment in which they remain important but do not have the market power of yesterday? (Because of their (dwindling) subscriber base and ancillary business activities many Nordic newspaper companies are in a much better position to do so than for example US newspapers.)

2) Can the political compromise behind strong public service broadcasting be renewed for a new era of cross-platform public service media in a way that does not lead to PSBs crowding out private sector news providers and thus undermining the diversity of provision? (While still allowing PSBs the resources to compete with pay TV and global entertainment giants.)

3) Can a way forward be found that ensures news coverage not only of select part of national politics, business, and other public affairs, but also of regional and peripheral public affairs? (The region has a tradition of quite strong regional news media, the private ones are having a hard time reinventing themselves and the local PSB offerings are often merged into larger and larger regional services in danger of losing their local connection.)

The full magazine article is below the jump. If you want to know about my imaginary sister in Turku, you’ll have to read the whole thing…

The best media in the world—and why they are about to change

Every country in the world would count itself lucky to have media like the Finnish media. Strong and widely read newspapers across the country. Several profitable commercial broadcasters that provides news as well as entertainment. Well-funded, widely used, and politically independent public service. High levels of broadband access and smartphone usage. Even a handful of interesting online-only news media—all combined with high levels of journalistic professionalism, well-guarded media freedoms, and transparent regulation of media ownership and media markets. Finland today may have the best media in the world.

They are also about to change, because even small, wealthy and homogenous Nordic welfare states are not immune to the structural transformations that media around the world are undergoing. It is no secret that the twenty-first century has shaken the media world we have inherited from the twentieth century. The single most important trend changing the media is the continued expansion of the number of options available to audiences and advertisers. This expansion originates in political, economic, and technological developments that gathered pace in the 1980s and 1990s with deregulation of the media sector in many countries, the growth of multi-channel television, the launch of an increasing number of free newspapers, and the spread of first-generation internet access via dial-up modems. It has been vastly accelerated by the spread of digital television and broadband internet in the 2000s. The rise of the “mobile web” accessed via smartphones and tablets points to a further increase in the number of options. It is impossible to say with certainty how much each of us has to choose from today, but researchers have tried anyway. One team working the United States estimates that the average American in 1960 had about 82 minutes of media content available to choose from for every minute in the day, mainly from books, magazines, newspapers, radio and television. By 2005, the same average American had an estimated 884 minutes of media content to choose from for each minute in the day—and that is counting the entire internet as one (1) minute competing with 884 minutes’ worth of other options, so the real figure is, given the vast number of site on the internet, much, much higher.

The move from the comparatively low-choice environment of the 1960s to the high choice environment of the 2000s has intensified competition for audiences’ attention, for the money people spend on media, and for advertisers’ budgets. Even though they still loom large in our media landscape, the relative losers in that intensified competition are the legacy media organizations—newspapers especially, but increasingly also television broadcasters—who dominated the twentieth century media world but have to get used to a new twenty-first century reality. Every time a reader leaves the Helsingin Sanoma or their local newspaper for a specialized website, every time a viewer clicks away from MTV3 or Nelonen to one of the countless niche channels available to more and more Finns, resources shifts away from the traditional twentieth century incumbents, putting pressure on their business models, because ultimately private sector media organizations depend on people spending their time and money with them to survive. This in turn necessitates cuts in newsroom and elsewhere in the organization.

This move, away from a limited number of mass media competing for our attention to a world in which a few giants like Google and Facebook and a growing number of smaller providers play a much larger role, has been underway for more than a decade. Despite increased competition from both the new giants and the new smaller providers, legacy media organizations coming out of broadcasting and newspaper publishing remain absolutely central to news provision in most Western democracies. New online and mobile media have created opportunities for interpersonal communication and for sharing, remixing, and producing digital content. But, so far, the internet has not provided much support for ongoing professional journalistic work, and the hopes associated with “citizen journalism” in the mid-2000s have turned out to have been misplaced. To see just how prominently legacy media figures in underwriting news production, consider data from the Finnish Union of Journalists—their figures suggest that newspaper companies in 2011 employed almost 9,000 journalists, radio and television broadcasters about 5,000, and new media companies 56. Yes, fifty-six. And it is not clear that this is about to change. Together with a colleague, I have examined a selection of nine of the most important and editorially successful online-only journalistic start-ups across a range of European countries. All of them are struggling to break even. As small content-producers based on large part on advertising income, they are under immense competitive pressures on the one hand from the giants of the online advertising market (Google and Facebook) and on the other hand from newspapers and broadcasters that still dominate the market for online news content. Even as new forms of content production and distribution are clearly on the rise, news is still primarily produced by legacy media, especially newspaper companies, and is still primarily disseminated by legacy media companies, especially broadcasters. These “old” media have also found large audiences—though little profit—on the internet. When they suffer economically, as they do today, their ability to underwrite journalism also suffers.

So far, the impact of the digital revolution on legacy media has differed greatly from country to country, even within the world of similarly affluent Western democracies. Finnish newspapers are feeling the pinch but have so far withstood the transition much better than their counterparts elsewhere, in part because many of them still have the resources to produce relevant, quality content that appeals to their readers, in part because they are an integrated part of many peoples’ lives—subscribing to a newspaper has for a long time been something you “just do” if you are a certain kind of person. The development has been most dramatic in the United States, where, by contrast, almost all major news providers have lost revenues, seen their profit margin shrink or disappear, and have cut their investment in journalism. From 2000 to 2009, print newspaper circulation relative to population declined 25% in the US, total industry turnover fell by 36%, and the total journalistic workforce shrank by 17%, leaving especially local and state-level political issues subject to less and less journalistic scrutiny. In Southern European countries like France and Italy, many newspaper companies are also struggling as challenges associated with the rise of the internet threaten their already weak commercial foundations, forcing some to rely on cross-subsidies from non-media businesses or financial support from their owners. (The Mediterranean countries never really had the kind of widely-read subscription-based newspapers common in for example the Scandinavian countries. You didn’t get Le Monde or La Repubblica delivered at home, you bought it from a newsstand on your way to work.) In Northern Europe, including Finland, newspapers have so far held their own to a much greater extend. Obviously newspapers like Rheinische Post in Germany or Aamulehti in Finland and many others like them feel the pressure too as their print circulation drops every year, undermining both sales and advertising revenues without the growing number of new online readers making up for what is lost. But newspapers in countries like Finland still have more subscribers and more advertisers than their counterparts in many other countries, and thus more resources to invest in navigating the digital transition ahead. This does not mean that they won’t have to do it. Despite the many important differences between, say, American, Italian, and Finnish media, one aspect of the challenges they face with the digital transition is the same—very few legacy media companies have convinced significant numbers of people that their online content is worth paying for, and because the online advertising that can be sold on websites generates only a fraction of the revenue generated by for example print advertising. In the US, the saying is that print dollars is replaced by digital dimes. The digital content business is a very tough one where very few companies have succeeded, and many more failed.

That’s bad news for media owners, media companies, and for those who work for them, who will ultimately lose their jobs unless the industry finds its footing in a new digital world. Does it matter for anyone else? There are reasons to believe it does, because professional journalists, working for precisely the kind of companies that are now rattled by the digital transition, play an important role in keeping an eye on people in positions of power, publicizing different views on the issues of the day, and keep ordinary citizens at least somewhat informed about public affairs. Journalism is certainly far from perfect, and all too rarely lives up to its own lofty aspirations, but no other profession does as much to provide the proverbial man on the street with relatively accurate, timely, and accessible information about what is going on beyond his private sphere. Social media and new ways of sharing information via increasingly ubiquitous and mobile digital and networked technologies have enriched our personal lives in many ways and given us new ways of forwarding information about politics and the like, but most of the news we share, comments on, and discuss on Facebook and the like is still produced by journalists working for legacy media companies that make their money primarily of offline platforms like printed newspapers or television broadcasting (leaving aside public service media). There will be fewer of these journalists in the future, most of them will work for weaker organizations, and many of them will reach fewer people with most of their work.

At least that is the direction of travel we see across the world of affluent Western democracies. Though license-fee funded public service broadcasting and, in some countries, a few exceptionally successful commercial news media companies provide important counterpoints, the general trend is one towards a diminished journalistic profession as more and more different media offerings compete for people’s attention and advertisers’ budgets, but fewer and fewer of these offerings are built around professionally produced news. It is a world in which fewer news organizations have the resources and will to challenge people in positions of power in government, the private sector, or elsewhere, as the balance of power between journalists and the armies of PR specialists and lawyers they face changes. It is a world in which the remaining mass media audiences that continue to draw a socially and politically diverse audience day after day erodes even further as more and more people drift away to more specialized news offerings or abandon the news altogether in favor of entertainment or social media. It is a world in which, as a consequence, there will be a growing gulf between the few who will in all likelihood be more informed than ever before, and the many who will find less and less news produced for them. This is not where Finland is today in terms of media, but it is the direction Finland, like most other Western democracies, is heading in.

If you are a regular reader of the Helsingin Sanomat, odds are you will do just fine in this new world. You will probably still get the paper in some form, perhaps digitally. In any case YLE will still provide news and other programming for people like you. New commercial niche offerings might very well try to appeal to you too, since you probably have a higher-than-average income and thus represent an attractive advertising demographic. And if you want an international perspective, you probably speak at least one other language, so you can consult the New York Times, Le Monde, or Spiegel if Finnish offerings occasionally seem too provincial. In addition, you can get all this stuff cheaply, at your convenience, on your mobile digital device—and share it and discuss it with your friends.

But imagine, if you will, that you have a sister who has not gone to university, who is a single mom, and who works behind the till at a bank in Turku. Thirty years ago, it would have been a given that she subscribed to a newspaper. Today, less so, especially if she is young. First of all, it is expensive and she doesn’t always get around to reading it. The copies just pile up all week and then she has to throw them out on Sunday with that sting of bad consciousness all newspaper subscribers feel once in a while. Second, when she does flick through the newspaper, much of the news inside is depressing or incomprehensible, men in suits arguing over things she can’t relate to in terms she don’t understand. Third, there are so many other things on the television and on the internet that is more attractive, and besides, she gets a bit of news from the radio every morning over breakfast and sometimes in the evening on TV—so why bother?

Public service broadcasting, mass-oriented commercial television news, and a proud tradition of populist tabloid journalism means that many more people in Northern Europe gets at least some news on a regular basis, also people like your imaginary sister in Turku, but in the United States, where public service is very weak, the mantra of commercial television is “define your niche”, and only a couple of cities have genuine tabloid newspapers, about 1 in 5 adults no longer get any news on a regular basis. Though nothing prevents them from perusing the free websites of newspapers like the Washington Post, television broadcasters like CBS or cable channels like CNN, or the hundreds of online-only start-ups trying to compete with them, more and more Americans, even amongst those who have internet access, get no news at all. High choice does not entail widespread use, as people go for the things that interest them most, and that does not necessarily involve news.

Thus, from a democratic perspective, we live in an increasingly Dickensian media world—it is the best of times, it is the worst of times. The best journalism today is arguably better than it has ever been, even in the United States where news media have faced their deepest commercial crisis since the great depression. Though coverage of local and state-level politics has suffered, the coverage of the 2012 Presidential Election has, at its best, been more detailed, informative, and up-to-date than ever before, impartially covering the candidates’ and their campaigns, but also challenging them when they play fast and loose with the facts or shifted their positions on important issues for tactical advantage, offering more context and historical perspective, especially on ever richer and more interactive websites, than ever before. There has certainly also been endless “churnalism”, journalists hoodwinked by candidates’ spokesmen, uncritically disseminating the spin of campaign surrogates, or covering bloviating pundits as if they knew what they were talking about, but for those with an interest in politics, discriminating taste, and perhaps the willingness to pay a few dollars for online access to high-quality products like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, this election has been eminently well-covered. And yet something like fifty million adult Americans have paid it little attention to journalistic campaign coverage.

The vast majority of the coverage of the election was produced by professional journalists working for legacy media organizations. Much of it was disseminated via legacy media, with television the most widely used source of campaign news, and about one in four Americans still reporting that they regularly read printed newspapers, despite about eighty percent being regular internet users. But more and more has been disseminated online. The internet (in practice overwhelmingly content from the websites of legacy media) was the second most widely used source of campaign news, used by one in three adult Americans. Using one platform does not preclude using others. Often, the same people are following the news on both television, online, and in print, while others get no news on either of these platforms. Few rely on only one platform. The same is the case in Finland. Despite having one of the world’s highest levels of internet use, broadband access, and smartphone pick-up, people read both printed newspapers and online news. As Valtteri Niiranen from the Federation of the Finnish Media Industry pointed out in an interview with my colleague Kari Karppinen from the University of Helsinki, “Around 60–70% of the readers are ‘mixed users’, 20% read only the printed newspaper, and 20% read online newspapers only.” This is the case in many other countries too. Thus, most media users continue to mix and match ‘old’ and ‘new’ media on the basis of their personal preferences and the options available. Today, as before in media history, new media have supplemented old media much more than they supplant them. The paradigmatic form of media use in the Western world today may well be someone watching television while checking their Facebook account on their laptop or smartphone, or someone flicking through a newspaper or magazine after a long day working in front of a computer.

To thrive in this world with increasingly intense competition from multiple offerings for people’s attention and more and more different places advertisers can place their money, journalists and news media organizations have to think much harder about how they remain relevant to people, distinct from the competition, and deliver a quality that merits the time spend with it—and perhaps even a modest fee to access it in the first place. Private sector news media that have to cover their cost and deliver a reasonable return on investment to investors (like any other business) will have to think about how they can do this on a budget that is much smaller than what they have been used to, and will in the case of newspapers probably be even smaller in the future—perhaps half or even a third of what they were used to in the 1990s. Because for all the drama of the last decade of change, the bigger transformation is ahead of us. First of all, legacy media are still propped up by the inherited media routines of millions of people who grew up in a low choice mass media environment and continue to use television and printed newspapers much more than digital offerings when it comes to news and entertainment. But as media executives are well aware, younger generations are growing up accustomed to a very different media environment and it is far from clear that they can be lured in as loyal subscribers who pay for the news they read or can be enticed to patiently watch the advertising that pays for the programming. Every time a Finn dies, odds are that a newspaper loses a subscriber. But there are no guarantees every baby born will become a newspaper subscriber. This demographic change has only just begun and will unfold over the coming decades. Second, though many audiences have moved online at a slower pace and less wholesale than some observers sometimes assume, many advertisers have been even more conservative. But ultimately, as people migrate from offline to online offerings, advertising budgets will follow them. A rule of thumb often used by media analysts is that the percentage of advertising expenditures that goes to a particular media platform is broadly the same as the percentage of their time using media people spend using that particular platform. This is sobering news for for example newspaper companies. Take again the example of the United States, where newspapers have, as mentioned, already suffered through the worst commercial newspaper crisis since the 1930s as literally billions of dollars in advertising has shifted away from print to other platforms. And yet a much bigger shift lie ahead—as of 2011, the media analyst Mary Meeker estimates that newspapers in the United States accounted for about 7% of all the time Americans spend with media, but still drew about 25% of all media advertising. Ultimately, those two figures will reach some sort of parity, so unless newspapers can massively expand their audience and lure people to spend more time with them across their multi-platform offerings, they will lose much, much more advertising over the coming years, further exacerbating their already serious economic difficulties. This is why more and more newspaper companies, now including the Helsingin Sanomat, are introducing various kinds of paywalls. Global flagship titles like the New York Times and specialist niche publications like the Financial Times in the UK are already building significant digital subscriber bases and thus moving towards a more diverse and robust revenue base to continue to bankroll professional journalism. It remains to be seen whether national and regionally oriented general interest newspapers can do the same.

It is sometimes said that people get the politicians that they deserve. Perhaps the same could be said about the media, that in affluent, democratic countries, we get the media we deserve. Finland has after the end of the Cold War had some of the strongest, most diverse, independent, and wide-reaching news media in the world. These media are changing. Clearly, Finnish media are not in a situation comparable to that in the United States today, and they won’t be tomorrow. Finnish newspapers still enjoy wide readership and a considerable degree of trust and loyalty earned by serving their communities over the years. Finnish commercial broadcasters still draw audiences and advertisers. And license fee funding for YLE ensures that public service media supplements and competes with privately produced media content. Furthermore, many Finnish media companies are of course to some extent protected against competition from outsiders by the language barrier. Finally, more Finns follow the news than in almost any other country, as a long as they do that, commercial news media in Finland will do somewhat better than their counterparts elsewhere. But these important advantages will not shield Finnish media from impact of the most fundamental change in the media world these years, the ever more intense competition for audiences’ attention and for advertisers’ budgets. Google and Facebook dominate online advertising in Finland as they do in most other countries around the world. Finnish incumbents are strong in the declining (newspapers) and stable (television) media sectors, less so in the growing ones, like online. As long as this is the direction we are moving in, the commercial underpinnings of professional journalism in Finland will continue to erode and private sector news media companies will have to think about, in that management cliché, how they can do “more with less”—or at least how they can, with fewer journalists, continue to produce distinct, quality content that appeals to people and keep them informed about their town, their country, and the wider world. Real-life journalists have rarely been the heroes of popular culture and the profession’s own imagination, the brave Bob Woodwards and Carl Bernsteins of Watergate fame speaking truth to power and bringing down Presidents, or the courageous Jan Guillous and Peter Bratts who gained Scandinavian renown for their reporting on the clandestine “Information Bureau” in Sweden, exposing the lies and abuses that have sometimes thrived at the heart of idyllic Nordic welfare states. But even ordinary journalists, conscientious hard-working professionals who get up every morning to cover everyday affairs, in the town hall, in parliament, in Brussels, covering what are private companies or trade unions up to, play a less heroic but ultimately crucial rule in contemporary democracy. They keep an eye on people in positions of power, present different viewpoints on the issues of the day, and allow ordinary citizens to remain at least somewhat informed about public affairs by providing timely, relatively accurate, and generally accessible news. Leaving aside those who work for public service media like YLE, they can only do this because the private companies they work for are profitable enough to pay their salaries. That profitability is under increasing pressure in an ever-more competitive media economy. Finding a niche where they can stay relevant in this environment is the central challenge facing media managers and journalists. If you value what these journalists do—for all their faults, shortcomings, and occasional missteps—and hope they will be able to do it in the future too, I have only one recommendation. Renew your subscription.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is assistant professor of communications at Roskilde University in Denmark and research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. He recently published “Ten Years that Shook the Media World”, a report on developments in commercial news media around the world.

This seems to have been the conviction all the way to the top of the Republican Party. Reports suggest that Romney, Ryan, and key people around them remained confident of victory to the very end, seeing that they were “hitting their numbers” in many districts—only to realize as Election Night unfolded that turnout would exceed their expectations in most swing states, raising the bar for victory and leaving them in the unenviable position of having achieved their tactical goals but lost the strategic battle nonetheless.

Preliminary reports on turnout suggest that the Obama re-election campaign succeeded again in shaping the very nature of the electorate through massive investments of time, effort, and money in both the technical infrastructure and the raw manpower necessary for an effective up-to-date ground game. Yet again, they have set the standard against which other presidential campaigns will be measured (the way Karl Rove and the Bush-Cheney reelection bid did in 2004). The Republican Party no doubt had a better ground game this time than in 2008, but the RNC task force created to study the Democratic campaign has plenty of work to do if the GOP hopes to close the strategic gap.

But what does the increased emphasis on a combination of old-fashioned organizing and door-to-door campaigning and increasingly sophisticated database-assisted voter targeting mean beyond the strategic level of how campaigns are waged and won? What does it mean for popular participation in American democracy?

This debate, especially concerning whether various forms of micro-targeting will lead to electoral red lining and leave people outside the democratic process is not new. It has been going on for more than a decade as the political parties have been catching up with the move towards more detailed and individual-level behavioral targeting long used in corporate communications and commercial marketing.

There have been two basic positions—

First, the pessimistic one outlined by Marshall Ganz in the early 1990s, suggesting that ever more precise targeting of voters will narrow the electorate by leading campaigns to focus their efforts on fewer and fewer people leaving others outside the process.

Second, the more optimistic one outlined by Peter Wielhouwer in the early 2000s, suggesting that more sophisticated targeting would also allow campaigns to identify more voters it makes sense to talk to and try to motivate, and thus expand the electorate as more people are turned out to vote.

Based on the evidence we’ve seen so far from 2012, who’s right? Both, in a way—at least Nate Silver’s analysis shows that turnout was steady in the swing states (and increased in several) even as it was down by about nine percent in the rest of the country. In some states, intensive and data-driven field efforts have expanded the electorate, in much of the country, only the usual suspects came out to vote.

This shouldn’t surprise us, as it is in line with the incentives that electoral campaigns face—as I wrote in my book Ground Wars based on research on previous election cycles:

Does the increasingly precise and individualized targeting possible today, then, expand the electorate, as some have suggested, or does it in fact narrow it, as others have argued? On closer inspection it turns out it does both, depending on the strategic situation. On the one hand, the new dominant targeting scheme identifies numerous new high-value persuasion and get-out-the-vote targets that were entirely invisible under the demographic and geographic targeting schemes that preceded it. The swing voter with an unusual demographic profile can suddenly be identified. The infrequently voting partisan who happens to live among supporters of the other party can be ferreted out. In this sense, the dominant targeting scheme clearly expands the universe of targets and thus enables much more ambitious persuasion and GOTV programs. But on the other hand, campaign assemblages typically only bother to contact such targets if they face strong opposition. Thus, as Marshall Ganz has warned since the early 1990s, in the vast majority of districts where elections are not effectively contested, the new political targeting may in fact narrow the electorate by helping campaigns focus on an ever more clearly defined plurality of highly motivated and highly partisan supporters who turn out on a regular basis to return the incumbent to office. But in competitive districts the new targeting scheme makes it possible for campaign assemblages to leverage their considerable resources to actually expand the electorate in significant ways, both in terms of persuasion efforts and get-out-the-vote efforts—and when the stakes are high enough, even through voter registration efforts. These have long been left for well-meaning civic associations and nonpartisan groups, but were taken up again and pursued with considerable energy and finesse by the Bush campaign among conservative Christians in 2000 and 2004, and by the Obama campaign among African Americans, Latinos, and college students in 2008 on the basis of new forms of political targeting.

The preliminary numbers on turnout from Silver and others suggests this is exactly what happened in 2012. And in the future too, we should expect to see ever more intense efforts to reach more and more potentially persuadable or potentially “mobilizable” voters in high-stakes, well-resourced, competitive elections, even as the majority of Americans who live in states and districts that are not competitive will hear less and less from campaigns as they, quite reasonably, use all available information to concentrate their resources where they think they matter.

My book, Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, deals with how American political campaigns mobilize, organize, and target their field operations, using large numbers of volunteers and paid part-timer workers to contact voters at home at the door or over the phone. It is published by Princeton University Press and is available on Amazon.

(cross-posted to Politics in Spires)

Clearly, the cyclical and structural pressures felt by most of the news industry have played a decisive role in this decision. It is also clear that print is a smaller and smaller (though still significant) part of the overall media environment of affluent democracies, in terms of both audience, sales revenue, and advertising revenue.

But print remains the most important and most profitable part of the news business for most legacy media companies, often accounting for 80%-90% of overall revenues and most of the profit. Digital continues to be at best breaking even or delivering a thin margin, and often continues to make losses even at very prominent news organizations with sizable online/mobile audiences.

Print is shrinking, but it will continue to be a key part of the many, diverse platforms and sources of revenue of many well-run news organizations for years to come. Digital is growing, but still hard to make money off.

Some of the best news magazines around the world, including the Economist operating from the UK, Spiegel in Germany, and to some extent Newsweek’s most direct US competitor, Time Magazine, have managed to build very promising print-digital hybrid models around exactly this basic insight–print and digital typically need to go hand in hand to make things work financially. Born-digital news sites like Politico in the US and The European in Germany and Rue89 in France have all resorted to print products as part of their attempts to build sustainable businesses (and not simply large online audiences drawn by free content). Many of these have so far weathered the ongoing digital transition better than many other legacy media companies. I would be very surprised to see any of the above-mentioned news magazines go digital-only in the near future.

So if Newsweek’s decision to stop printing isn’t the end of print, what is it then?

It is a case to illustrate the point that for legacy print-based media organizations to survive in the vastly more competitive media environment of today, faced with both cyclical and structural challenges, they need—

1)      Operational excellence in terms of running eroding legacy businesses to ensure that they continue to contribute to the bottom line and enable investment in innovation and quality content. It is bad enough to lose money on digital offerings. Many companies do. If you lose money on your legacy offerings too, you are in deep trouble. Newsweek has been losing money for years and its print circulation has declined much faster than for example Time’s.

2)      A reality-based digital strategy that includes a way of generating revenue of expensively produced content. Free as a money-making proposition works only for a very few, very big sites—the volume game has few winners, and most of them are not content-producers but services. (Last year, Zenith Optimedia estimated that Google gobbled up almost 45% of global online advertising spending in 2010. The top five companies together accounted for more than 60%. None of them are content producers.)

3)      A clear value-proposition to one or more clearly defined target audiences and a convincing differentiation between you and your nearest competitors to ensure you can (a) earn people’s attention (and perhaps persuade some to embrace a pay model) and (b) at least ensure you get premium CPM rates for your web traffic.

Newsweek has been a great news magazine and has produced some great journalism. But it had none of the above. In today’s media environment it is increasingly marginalized, an also-ran compared to its main competitors. Second best would have been easily good enough in the most hospitable environment of pre-digital, pre-crisis media. It no longer is.

After a long period with a significant advantage to the incumbent, Obama and Romney are now effectively tied in Real Clear Politics’ national average of polls, and the President’s lead in many swing states seems diminished.

Forecasters like Nate Silver still consider Obama to be the favorite, but it is clear that this election is far from over and the last four weeks will matter a lot.

The day-to-day media coverage is very noisy (and so are the polls from the last weeks). First, the “47 percent”-remark was seen as some as the final nail in the Romney candidacy. Then the President’s performance in the first televised debate supposedly relaunched the Republican nominee’s campaign. Things are volatile, and it is hard to nail down what exactly drives which swings in what parts of the electorate.

One thing we do know–both amongst political operatives and amongst social scientists–is that a strong field operation can be decisive in a close race. That’s why both campaigns and their various allies are investing tens of millions in local offices, field staffers, technologies for organizing and targeting canvassing and phone banks more effectively, and in volunteer mobilization (and in paying people something like ten bucks an hour to make calls or knock on doors when there aren’t enough volunteers to meet the target goals).

Field operations–“ground wars”–are not the only thing that matters in the final weeks, but they are among the things that matter in the final weeks. And in particular because they also provide ordinary Americans who wish to a chance to play an active role in electoral politics and advance the cause or candidate they favor, I wish this side of the campaign would receive as much media scrutiny as the thousands and thousands of words spilled over the debates, the TV advertisements, the fundraising, and the rest of it. What sociologists like William Gamson call “collective action frames”, that  is, action-oriented ways of talking about politics that inspire and legitimize active involvement, can in themselves help increase political participation.

Field operations, canvassing, and phone banking, these seemingly prosaic aspects of political campaigns are worth paying attention to in part because they matter, but also because they allow people to matter. You probably can’t write the killer line for the next TV debate, create the knock-out ad that everyone will remember, or donate a million dollars to the candidate of your choice. But you can spend a few hours (or countless hours) volunteering, and actually make a difference.

It’s worth repeating–if you want to make a difference in November, go knock on doors.

My book, Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, deals with how American political campaigns mobilize, organize, and target their field operations, using large numbers of volunteers and paid part-timer workers to contact voters at home at the door or over the phone. It has just been published by Princeton University Press and is available on Amazon.