Thanks to Tom Whitwell, assistant editor for Times Online, for bringing this to our attention: today’s print edition of the Times complete with joint byline for developer Julian Burgess.
The graphic printed was a visualisation of answers to a blog post on the Times’ Comment Central, which asked readers what their biggest hope for President elect Barack Obama was.
Following reports that the print editions of certain US newspapers sold out after Barack Obama was declared President elect, some ‘collector’s copies’ have appeared on eBay.
How about $80 for this edition of the New York Times from yesterday? You get a ‘resealable plastic envelope’ too.
Not a fan of the Times? Well, why not snap up these eight papers from the Chicago area for just $500. No bids as yet, so if you’re quick…
A new online revenue stream for the traditional printed paper perhaps?
Tags: Barack Obama, Chicago, eBay, the New York TimesSo it doesn’t need saying that US Election 2008 took place in a very different media climate from the one experienced in 2004: just take a look at CNN à la 2004, and CNN right now.
It’s hard to actually think back and remember that four years ago the focus for many of this year’s online followers was still on the TV screen.
Last night we followed live-streams. We Twittered. We traced maps. We enjoyed striking homepage designs as the results came in.
This was the year for multimedia to really come into its own. The public outside the electoral college had a chance to participate from afar. Many bloggers might not have had a vote, but they could be influential: by spreading round a Sarah Palin debate flow-chart, casting a vote on a remote voting map, or putting a supporting button onto their sites (the online version of the rosette).
MercuryNews.com gave these, as the ninth and tenth reasons for McCain’s defeat:
9. “The Internet. Obama broke an earlier pledge and opted out of public financing, allowing him to raise at least $200 million in September and October, in millions of donations averaging $86. He raised more than twice as much money as McCain, and was able to pay for staff and ads in states and in numbers that McCain could only dream about. His 30-minute infomercial six days before the election drew more than 34 million viewers — more people than watched the finale of ‘American Idol’ last year or the final game of the World Series.”
10. “Better ground game. Obama mobilized young people and used technology, from text messages to internet meet-ups, in ways that built the first truly 21st century campaign. It might have brought guffaws at the GOP Convention, but it turns out that being a ‘community organizer’ is a good skill to have when running a presidential campaign.”
Obama’s campaign page thanks the various efforts of his internet supporters, links to his mobile content, and shows where you can find ‘Obama everywhere’:
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
And what about the negative effect for McCain? You may have your reservations about this story, but Fox News reported in July how McCain supporters could have been hijacked through spam reports to Google Blogger, prompting a Republican blogger move over to WordPress.
Renee Feltz, over at the Columbia Journalism Review, looks in detail at whether McCain was ‘blogged down in the past’ with ‘top-down internet tactics’, which left him unable to keep up with Obama’s social networking strategy.
This diagram shows the online blog cluster:
(screenshot, courtesy of Morningside Analytics via CJR)
Feltz describes how the map “shows a ‘halo’ of about 500 relatively new blogs in two isolated clusters. One cluster includes several hundred anti-Obama blogs (orange) and the other contains several hundred pro-McCain and pro-Palin blogs (green).”
Their isolation shows that they are not well-connected to political blogs with the longer histories, a point which John Kelly, Morningside’s chief scientist and an affiliate of the Berkman Center, explains on the CJR post.
Please do add your own Obama bloggin’ thoughts here. Was is the blogs, and which ones, which gave Obama strength? And what should we expect on the multimedia horizon for 2012?
Tags: Barack Obama, Berkman Center, Columbia Journalism Review, google, internet campaign, internet tactics, John Kelly, John McCain, Mercury News, obama blog, obama blogging, online rosette, Renee Feltz, Republican Party, Sarah Palin, social networking strategy, us electionThis from Beet.TV, an interview with CNN.com and CNN International. By 3pm US time, the sites had received 88 million page views this afternoon, three to four times more than on an average weekday, executive vice president of CNN News Services Susan Grant told Beet.TV. In this clip:
To complement its liveblogged coverage of election day, which is still going at time of writing, Guardian.co.uk has changed its homepage design to the below:
This is a template that could be used for other major news events. As BBC News online editor Steve Herrmann told Journalism.co.uk earlier this week the election has been a great opportunity for news sites to experiment with coverage and layout, developing features for future use.
Tags: Barack Obama, BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation, guardian, Steve Herrmann, US elections, USABeware, this is catchy - it’s got Journalism.co.uk bopping on its swivel chair this morning:
… ‘All the voters of America / Barack Obama be thy name / Thy change shall come / Thy will be done / As it is in American dream’…
Here’s an “addictive reggae song with the jamaican ‘proactive’ beat” from Ohanglaman ‘Makadem’ … “an artistic Kenyan contribution regarding the US presidential elections, unique for its universal rather than local or tribal angle. A must hear and a must see.”
It can’t be embedded here, so follow the link above to listen. It’s a recent offering from A24, the all-African video agency which launched in September. All rights information is listed below the video.
Tags: A24, Barack Obama, Journalism.co.ukSo, the first tweeted presidential debate. This week the AP reported that Current TV will let its audience have their say by publishing their live Twitter comments on screen; now the news is doing the rounds on the blogs.
During the debates, the station will broadcast Twitter messages (or tweets) from viewers as John McCain and Barack Obama go head to head.
It’s all certainly a lot further on than when the first ever debate went out on television: on September 1960 26, when 70 million US viewers watched senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts word-battle vice president Richard Nixon.
Current TV, which is extremely pro viewer interaction, was actually co-founded by Al Gore, though the channel says ‘Hack the Debate’, as it has become known, was not his idea.
An article over at the Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC) says, of the Nixon-Kennedy debate, “Perhaps as no other single event, the Great Debates forced us to ponder the role of television in democratic life.”
So, does Twittering and instantaneous (as much as it can be) viewer feedback have anything like the same significance? What’s the role of the internet here in democratic life?
Also, comments will be filtered to fit in with broadcast standards: does this change its impact at all?
Tags: Al Gore, Barack Obama, blogging, blogs, John Kennedy, John McCain, Massachusetts, Museum of Broadcast Communications, presidential debate, Richard Nixon, tweets, Twitter, United States, USACNN’s web traffic did rather well out of Hurricane Gustav: a press release issued yesterday told us that breaking news channel CNN.com Live ‘more than doubled its highest day on record on Monday, by serving more than 1.7 million live video streams globally’.
That figure represents a 124 percent increase on their previous highest day - February 21 - when it streamed the debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
In other news, another release announced the appointment of CNN’s first vice president of international digital services: Nick Wrenn, current managing editor for Europe, Middle East & Africa. Although based in Atlanta, Wrenn will manage all of the digital content outside of the US in his new role, bringing together CNN.com/international and mobile with its broadband services.
Wrenn will report to Tony Maddox, executive vice president and managing director of CNN International.
“Our digital services are playing an increasingly important part in the growth of CNN International and this new position ensures that they will be leveraged and incorporated into our current business appropriately,” said Maddox in the statement.
Tags: africa, Atlanta, Barack Obama, broadband services, CNN, CNN International, Hillary Clinton, Hurricane Gustav, International Digital Services, Management Change, Middle East, Nick Wrenn, Tony Maddox, United States, web traffic
Main news from Journalism.co.uk