An ever-more unequal playing field? Campaign communications across digital, “earned”, and paid media

Cristian Vaccari and I will be presenting a first slice of our 2012 data on campaign communications in competitive U.S. congressional districts across digital media, “earned media” (news coverage) and paid media (campaign expenditures on advertising, canvassing, direct mail, online marketing, etc) at the American Political Science Association 2013 annual meeting in Chicago.

We show that most of these forms of campaign communication are highly unevenly distributed. A minority of candidates draw far more supporters, more news coverage, and raise more money than the rest, even when one is looking only at major party candidates (Democrats and Republicans) running in similarly competitive districts.

Contrary to the view that the internet may help “level the playing field”, we find that popularity on digital media like Facebook is in fact far more concentrated than both visibility in mainstream news media and money raised and spent during the campaign. (This is in line with Matt Hindman’s earlier work on the winner-take-all tendencies of much political communication online.)

Three key empirical take-aways from the paper—

  1. Most candidates draw limited news coverage and few supporters on social media like Facebook and Twitter, and hence remain highly dependent on paid media to reach voters, despite the fact that almost all of them use almost all the digital media at their disposal (websites, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc).
  2. In both 2010 and 2012, paid media is unevenly distributed, earned media/news coverage is more unevenly distributed, and digital media/social media followings the most unevenly distributed. (Social media in 2010 discussed in greater detail here.)
  3. The general (uneven) pattern is the same in 2010 and 2012. If anything the inequality increases, especially in the case of digital media. Hence the notion of an ever-more unequal playing field as digital media—the most unevenly distributed form of campaign communication we examine—becomes relatively more important.

Abstract below, full paper here. We’d be interested in comments as this is work-in-progress and we are very interested in how to best compare the apples and oranges of digital media, earned media, and paid media in a meaningful way.

 An Ever-More Unequal Playing Field? Comparing Congressional Candidates Across Digital Media, Earned Media, and Paid Media

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (Roskilde and Oxford)

and

Cristian Vaccari (Royal Holloway and Bologna)

 Abstract

 In this study, we analyze patterns of digital media, earned media, and paid media performance among major-party candidates in competitive U.S. Congressional districts in the 2010 (N=112) and 2012 (N=120) election cycles. Based on standard concentration indices, we analyze the distribution of (1) interest from internet users (“digital media”), (2) visibility in news coverage (“earned media”), and (3) campaign expenditures (as an indicator of “paid media” like direct mail, television advertising, and online marketing) across a strategic sample of 464 candidates engaged in competitive races for the House of Representatives. We show that most of these forms of campaign communication are highly concentrated. A minority of candidates draw far more supporters, more news coverage, and raise more money than the rest. Contrary to the view that the internet may help “level the playing field”, we find that popularity on digital media like Facebook is in fact far more concentrated than both visibility in mainstream news media and money raised and spent during the campaign. By 2012, the most popular candidate in a district drew on average almost nine times as many social media supporters as her direct rival, compared to three and a half times as many local news stories and about four times as many dollars spent. The differences in terms of digital media and paid media had both increased since 2010, while the differences in terms of earned media had decreased. Thus, while success on the internet might occasionally benefit challengers and outsiders in US major-party politics, the overall competitive environment on the web is far from a level playing field and may in some ways exacerbate inequalities between resource-rich and resource-poor candidates. As digital media become more important parts of the overall communication environment, we may thus be moving towards a more uneven playing field.

2013 ICA conference round-up

Back from the International Communication Association’s 2013 Annual Conference in London. These things can be hit and miss, with thousands of researchers presenting papers in a multitude of parallel sessions, but this one was a hit for me. I had a very good conference, catching up with colleagues and hearing some interesting presentations on changes in political communication, innovations in journalism, and the increasing importance of various forms of algorithms in shaping our information environment.

So, far too many good things to properly summarize or name-check here, so instead I’ll zoom in on a continuing concern for me that the conference did nothing to dispel—namely the concern that most theoretical and empirical work on the implications of the rise of new digital technologies for how we communicate (and by extension for democracy, social relations, etc) focus on the intersection between spectacular cases and early adopters.

Basically, we have many more studies of how digitally savvy and highly wired elites and of cases like Andy Carvin’s coverage of the Arab spring, of Kony 2012, of the Obama campaigns, etc than we have of how the wider population and ordinary activists, journalists, and politicians engage with and connect in part through digital media.

We need more studies of ordinary people, we need more studies of ordinary organizations, we need more studies of ordinary campaigns. And we need more studies of failures. Not because early adopters and spectacularly successful campaigns do not matter. They do. But because they are not representative of the general experience, and because they are not necessarily forerunners for where everyone else will eventually find themselves. They are outliers on very skewed distributions, low-probability events with high visibility and sometimes high impact. They rarely represent the future modal outcomes.

I know studying the role of the internet in your local newspaper or local community activists’ daily work, or amongst working class folks in a suburban community isn’t as sexy as studying the Guardian/Wikileaks collaboration, the Gezi park mobilization, or whatnot. But we need such studies too to understand what is actually going on, and what will actually be going on in the coming years. So here’s for a repeat of the sadly deceased Susan Leigh Star’s call that we study (seemingly) boring things.

2013 RISJ Digital News Report out (including my essay on the uneven digital revolution)

The 2013 Reuters Institute Digital News Report is now out. The report provides a comparative view of news media use in nine countries, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US, based on an online survey conducted by YouGov.

The report, more details, and files with the data itself, is all available on digitalnewsreport.org.

I’ve written a short essay for the report on the uneven digital revolution where I go through some of the many differences that the data document, including pronounced differences in how people in different countries with similarly high levels of internet use, smartphone use, tablet use etc actually use digital media to engage with news and public affairs.

Based on the data behind the report, Kim Schrøder and I have also written a separate report (in Danish) focusing specifically on Denmark. It is available here. A resume of the main findings are (in Danish) below the jump.

Denmark is interesting here, I think, not only to Danes, but also more generally, because it has (a) the highest level of internet use, (b) the highest level of smartphone use, and (c) the highest level of tablet use of all the countries covered in the RISJ Digital News Report, and yet, using digital platforms to (1) get news and (2) engage in participatory forms of news use (commenting, sharing, etc) are as widespread in several of the other countries used.

Germany shares some of these characteristics, with high levels of digital media use generally, but legacy media like broadcast and print remaining very strong in terms of news specifically.

In the future, I hope to connect this data on media use more directly with my ongoing research on institutional variations in the structure of news media systems in different countries.

(Danish summary of the report on news media use in Denmark below the fold.)

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Direct communication via social media? Not for most politicians, no

Last week, Frank Bruni from the New York Times wrote a column trotting out an old idea—that new technologies like social media allow “direct communication” between politicians and the people, circumventing intermediaries like the news media. This is an old idea because it has accompanied many other media technologies before social media, including radio and television.

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.

Data-Crunched Democracy

I spent the day at Data-Crunched Democracy, an excellent conference organized by Daniel Kreiss and Joe Turow focused on the increasingly important role of “big data”, quantitative data analysis, and formal modeling in US political campaigns.

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”.

Genachowski did little to help journalism—will the next FCC chair act differently?

On March 22, the Federal Communication Commission Chairman, Julius Genachowski, confirmed that he is stepping down.

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.

The New York Times company leaving the U.S. newspaper industry behind

I’ve written a short blog post on the Huffington Post on the New York Times Company’s decision to (again) try to sell the New England Media Group (including the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette).

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.

Ground Wars, one year on

My book Ground Wars, on how American political campaigns reach out to voters at the door and over the phone, one person at a time, on a very large scale, was published a year ago.

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.

Post-industrial journalism across the western world plus predictions for 2013

I’ve written a comment on the Columbia Journalism School/Tow Center for Digital Journalism report on “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present”  for the Nieman Journalism Lab site discussing similarities and differences between the US and Europe, and also contributed a short piece for their series of predictions for what the year 2013 will bring for news/journalism, basically suggesting we’ll see more of the same plus at least one major surprise.

English version of “The Best Media in the World–and why they are about to change”

Below is a magazine article I wrote for the Helsingin Sanomat that was published Sunday December 9. With permission from my editor, Laura Saarikoski, I’m posting the English original (my Finnish is not as good as it ought to be, and maybe others might find this easier too). The translation has been slightly shortened but below is what I wrote.

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… Continue reading