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How much is Organizing for America’s support worth when thrown behind a conservative candidate that many of the progressives who volunteered on President Obama’s campaign find politically and ideologically distasteful? And what does this say about the role of social media in politics?

In Arkansas yesterday, a coalition labor unions, progressive activists, and ideological liberals failed to topple Senator Blanche Lincoln in the Democratic Primary. Earlier this summer, a similar coalition won the Democratic Senate nomination in Pennsylvania for Joe Sestak, at Arlen Specter’s expense. In both cases, the White House, Organizing for America—the rebranded skeletal operation that remains of President Obama’s campaign organization as an appendix to the Democratic National Committee—and the rest of the party apparatus supported, both publicly and operationally, the more conservative incumbent over a more progressive challenger, for fairly transparent tactical reasons (Don’t make no waves, don’t back no losers. Or at least not two losers, in this case).

My friend and colleague Dave Karpf and many others have offered their take on the strategic implications. I will write here about the practical, on-the-ground implications. A presidential endorsement is about money and PR, support from the party machinery is about money, expertise, and strong-arming local interest groups not to back your rivals—but OFA’s support is supposed to be about small-dollar donations and volunteer labor, leveraged via various web platforms.

The question is whether Organizing for America can actually deliver that if the minority on the 13-million strong email list it inherited from Obama for America who might want to volunteer when less is at stake politically than taking back the White House find the candidate they are asked to support unappealing.

I have not seen any numbers on how many calls and knocks were channeled into Arkansas and Pennsylvania through Organizing for America, but I would be surprised if it can compete with what activist groups and interest groups who asked their members to support candidates who might actually fight for their ideals and interests produced—the NYTimes reports that the unions that backed Bill Halter against Lincoln in Arkansas knocked on 170,000 doors and made 700,000 calls. I would like to see numbers from Organizing for America, since it excelled at generating such personal contacts in 2008, and will be tasked with doing so again during the 2010 mid-terms and in 2012.

If state-level progressive blogs are anything to go by, it wouldn’t be much. The Arkansas Project did not warm to the endorsement—witness the title “‘Organizing for America’ continues to be ridiculous.” The analysis from the Pennsylvania Progressive is analogous—“The Obama Movement effectively backed Sestak or stayed home for the most part. Obama cannot take the Obama Movement down paths outside their core values.”

So if my intuition is right, and Organizing for America could not offer much in terms of on-the-ground support for Lincoln and Specter, that is not because the kind of social media-augmented form of organizing its predecessor, Obama for America, represented has lost its potency—it is just that it is hard to control. This is because social media are social first, and tools next. They help people pursue their interest in getting engaged in something, whether that is gossip or politics, but they will disengage when they no longer care—and the people who were willing to get engaged in supporting Obama, and found ways to do so because his campaign engaged them through old-school organizing and clever use of social media, probably weren’t all that interested in supporting Lincoln and Specter, so they stayed home, or backed the other candidate. To make social media work in politics, in short, people have to care.

(cross-posted on TechPresident)

1. PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Newspaper Outlook 2009, “Moving into multiple business models”

An interesting overview of business outlooks based on surveys, interviews, and secondary sources from Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA. Fairly bullish about the future of the industry–“Newspapers have a long-term future and will coexist with other media.”–and explicitly points out that the troubles in the US newspaper industry may have as much to do with mergers and acquisitions as with the internet–“The credit crisis has greatly imperiled many US publishers who took on large amounts of debt to make recent acquisitions.” A lot of the suggestions they make will restructure much of the daily work in news organizations, and will, in some countries, require renegotiations of contracts and cooperation with various unions.

2. Raffi Khatchadourian’s piece on WikiLeaks in the New Yorker

I knew only little about Wikileaks before reading this (and now know only marginally more…), but I thought it was a pretty interesting piece, introducing not only the site itself, some of the issues it has been involved in, and some of the main activists driving it, but also more broadly gives a sense of its operations, plugged in as it is with left-leaning and libertarian politicians, businessmen, and technologists, international differences in privacy and transparency legislation, and a combination of off-the-shelf tools and hand-crafted technologies.

3. Peter Kafka’s notes on Richard Rosenblatt and Paul Steiger at D8, talking about Demand Media and ProPublica

Below two exchanges cribbed from the Q&A,

Question for Rosenblatt: Why won’t you call your people “journalists”? Steve Jobs was full of venom for “bloggers,” too. Why not call people who write for money “journalists”?

Rosenblatt: If our writers want to call themselves journalists, great. But they’re not doing reporting from Afghanistan. We’re content creators, making things that people want.

Question for Steiger: Do you share Steve Jobs’s distaste for bloggers?

Steiger: I sleep with a blogger!

Mary Joyce from meta activism has done yeoman’s work putting together an exciting new edited volume on digital activism.

The contributors include activists, academics, policy people–you name it. Including yours truly.

The book is available here for download, and here in print form.

On Thursday the 25th, I’ll present some work-in-progress on mobilizing practices in American campaigns from my dissertation at the “Politics and Protest” workshop at CUNY. It’s 4.15 till 6.15 p.m. at the CUNY Graduate Center building on 5th Avenue, on the 6th floor.

Does it seem hopelessly old-fashioned to care about letters to the editor? Maybe, but I’m not alone in doing so. The Democratic National Committee are asking people to write after Michael Steele’s comment that “a million dollars is not a lot of money.” Maybe not for you, Mr. Steele, maybe not for you…

Such initiatives rely on the existence of something I call the “letters institution”, a small aspect of the larger news institution though which newspapers make it possible for a few citizens to raise their voice and express themselves in public with a larger audience than most bloggers and tweeters have.

I think letters to the editor are interesting for much the same reason I find both new media technologies and old organizations like political campaigns interesting-they constitute a way in which people can take (a small) part in politics.

Anyway, I wrote an article about letters to the editor and the letters institution as it operates in Danish newspapers a while ago. It is now out in Journalism.

Abstract et al is below (thanks to Michael Schudson, Anker Brink Lund, and Lucas Graves for their helpful comments on earlier versions).

Continue reading →

Personal Democracy Forum 2010 is on in New York City, June 3 – 4, and always worth going to. The lead question this year is “Can the Internet fix politics?”

I fear it is more likely that politics and business will fix the Internet (and what a fix it will be), but I hope I’m wrong.

On these occasions, I like to recall Bertolt Brecht’s essay on the radio and think about the distance from what “can” be done to what “will”, and who might make the difference between one and the other.

Evgeny Morozov pokes what he calls “digital activism academia” in the eye in a recent post on Foreign Policy’s net.effect blog, calling it “useless”. I guess “different” would have been more polite, but whatever.

I think Morozov offers a useful, if sometimes exaggerated and polemical, counterweight to what he calls the “Internet helps democracy” meme in the various public debates he enters into. As he points out, the two major takes that play in mass-mediated (and many online) debates seems to be the “Internet helps democracy” meme, and then Morozov’s own “the Internet doesn’t help democracy” meme. That’s a nice he-said, she-said right there.

Meanwhile, academia is, as always, engaged in its own debates, which may strike some as useless, or maybe just different from what Morozov et al are doing. Insofar as there is a “field” (as he suggests) studying “digital activism” (and there really isn’t, though there is a debate of sorts that criss-cross communications studies, political science, sociology, and law, and often lives a precarious life at the very margins of each), my take on it is that it is beginning to move beyond the two-meme-slugfest of help/doesn’t help, and to the “it’s all very complicated” terrain where most empirically oriented scholars feel most at home, and where truths–if not always useful or convenient truths–are often to be found.

The work of people like Bruce Bimber, Matthew Hindman, Andrew Chadwick, and Philip Howard (and the “next wave” like my friends and colleagues Daniel Kreiss and David Karpf) may not offer much ammunition for Morozov and the people he argues with on television and on the net. But since these combattants seem to be doing just fine on their own, maybe it is a good–dare I say useful?–thing that other people turn to more rigorous analysis–whether quantitative, qualitative, or some combination–of what the hell is going on. Even if it takes time to do so.

Very apropos the question regarding journalistic independence and state involvement, Reporters without Borders just published their 2009 Press Freedom Index.

The low-public support United States is ranked 20th (with the UK and Luxembourg). The high-support Nordic countries are ranked a shared 1st (together with Ireland).

To take two examples, annual public support for journalism amounts to roughly $1.35 per capita in the U.S., versus about $200 per capita in my native Denmark. (does someone have figures from Ireland? I don’t)

Obviously, this does not imply causation, but at the very least it seriously challenges the idea that substantial public support for journalism necessarily undermines press freedom.

Len Downie and Michael Schudson’s report “Reconstructing American Journalism” was released early this week and has added much to an ongoing discussion around the future of the news in general, and reporting in particular.

It contains an impressive survey of where the profession stands today, makes sure to underline that it is not all doom and gloom, and ends on a somber tone by underlining that serious, concerted action is needed, by state, market, and civil society actors, if “accountability journalism” as we have come to know it in the 20th century is to survive on a large scale in the United States.

The report offers six recommendations, and number five, quoted below, has caused quite a ruckus:

“A national Fund for Local News should be created with money the Federal Communications Commission now collects from or could impose on telecom users, television and radio broadcast licensees, or Internet service providers and which would be administered in open competition through state Local News Fund Councils.”

This suggestion made the New York Times’ David Carr’s mind “reel” in his coverage of the report, Jeff Jarvis calls the idea “desperate” on BuzzMachine, and Michelle McLellan, writing in the Knight Digital Media Center newsletter, finds it “troubling”. Each offer somewhat different nuances of criticism all based on the same basic premise: public subsidies fundamentally undermines journalistic independence.

That can certainly be true, but to hold it to be true always and in all cases is a dangerous misconception that rests on a staggering ignorance when it comes to the history of journalism in the United States and the realities of journalism here and elsewhere.

1) Journalism has, as Paul Starr has shown, always been directly and indirectly supported by the Federal Government and many other public entities.

2) Much journalism today is at the receiving end of direct public support (Committee on Public Broadcasting, NPR), but hardly reduced to slavish dependency by it.

3) Many journalists around the world that we laud for their independent and critical scrutiny of people in power (whether public office holders, private businessmen, or union presidents) are working for institutions that are funded largely through public support–most notably of course the BBC.

To suggest that these historical and contemporary examples of accountability journalism are fundamentally undermined by their partial reliance funding sources is simply wrong, and an insult to the professionals who work there.

Newsgathering professional journalists have and will always have a complicated and sometimes uncomfortable relationship with those who pay their bills (whether these are advertisers channeling consumers’ money or public officials channeling citizens’ tax dollars). All-out dependence on any one source of funding (one large advertiser, complete government funding) will almost always lead to problematic situations. As James Curran and others have repeatedly argued, a mix of different sources of support is preferable to reliance on any single one.

To suggest that public subsidies have no role in saving American journalism from the serious short-term crisis facing it today (and in helping it prepare for medium- and long-term challenges) is a dangerous knee-jerk reaction that we will hopefully only see from a few people who are in a position where they can afford to gamble with their profession’s future.

Journalists and others working in the trenches will hopefully seize on the arguments offered in the report and use this critical moment to ally with outside partners to build a better journalism for tomorrow. Whether we get it is a political question as much as one of business models or professionalism, and I hope that the libertarians and free-market ideologues won’t dominate the discussion.

(full disclosure: Michael Schudson is the chair of my dissertation committee)

Bente Kalsnes has raised the issue of why there aren’t more tech-politics attempts in Scandinavia (despite high levels of broadband penetration, widespread use for a variety of other purposes, etc). I think her overview and question is interesting, but also that it exaggerates the absence and should be supplemented to understand what’s going on.

Since that’s what I research, I’ll write only about how political actors use Internet tools here (and leave aside transparency/oversight efforts and e-government), and suggest just three brief points I think apply to Scandinavia in general though they are based on the case of Denmark:

First, “size matters” in a very general sense–when used well, new information and communication technologies like the Internet can reduce many overhead and transaction costs associated with creating niche media and catering to particular constituencies, and this has made many new and exciting enterprises possible. But in small countries with distinct languages, the “base” may be too small to make it worthwhile (or even possible) for entrepreneurs to cater to them–the absence of a DailyKos in Denmark, a MoveOn, a TPM-style news site, or even of older niche endeavours like news magazines or highly specialized cable channels have, I suspect, more to do with the size of the “market” (or constituency), and in politics with the relative lack of a polarized and aggrieved base, than with technology as such. Comparing Denmark (population 5.5 million) with Wisconsin (pop 5.6m) makes more sense than comparing a lilliputian Scandinavian country with the Gulliver of the United States (pop 306m). (this point has wide implications that need to be thought out, I wonder if for instance  many aspects of the “Wealth of Networks” that Benkler writes about can be realized in small countries)

Secondly, reports of the absence of tech-politics from cold northern Europe are somewhat exaggerated. I would say that political parties in Denmark use tech tools at a level that is roughly comparable to organizations with similar resources in the U.S.–only, one has to keep in mind that those organizations are state parties and smaller state-level campaigns, not the national parties and large federal or state-level campaign organizations. The two largest parties in Denmark (Venstre and Socialdemokraterne) spent, respectively, $6 million (30 million DKK) and $2 million (11 million DKK) on the 2007 national elections, where 3.5 mio people voted. That’s in the region of what a competitive congressional campaign in the U.S. will spend in a district where 350,000 people vote. In the cases where smaller U.S. political actors are clearly more sophisticated than their Danish counterparts (data, fundraising, field), it is usually because they can piggy-back on the infrastructure of tools developed for much more well-financed campaigns (this ties in with critical mass, obviously).

Thirdly, it is important to recognize that political organizations in for instance Denmark have offline means at their disposal that aren’t all that different from what in the U.S. takes the form of online tools. Take the Meetups that generated such excitement during the Dean campaign and were later reincarnated via MyBarackObama. At one level, they really aren’t all that different from what local party committees do on an everyday basis all over a country like Denmark (the difference lies in data capture, where Danish parties certainly have a long way to go, but also less of an interest, since fundraising and field works very differently there). As in other discussions of the use of various tools, it makes sense to start with first principles and wider goals, look at what people are already doing, and only then ask why they aren’t using widget X, instead of simply observing that they aren’t, and then jumping to the conclusion that they are somehow “behind”.

There is certainly room for improvement when it comes to techpolitics in Scandinavia, both in terms of quantity and quality, but I think it would be more useful to try to identify how new tools can solve the particular problems that the Scandinavian countries actually face than compare the efforts there with American efforts to solve American problems, and then find them wanting.

(cross-posted on Personal Democracy Forum)