Tag Archives: John McCain

TG Daily: McCain Twitterview – attempting the impossible

Samantha Rose Hunt offers a thoughtful analysis of US broadcaster ABC’s attempt to interview Senator John McCain using Twitter.

“Interviews are conducted so that individuals can learn and understand situations, products or an individual better. Understanding someone within the confines of 140 characters has now been shown to be nearly impossible,” writes Hunt.

Perhaps Twitter wasn’t the right tool for the subject matter of this interview – but can it work for more appropriate content?

We’ve been experimenting with conducting interviews on Twitter at Journalism.co.uk. There are still some bugs to be worked out, but the social element of the interview that you get by opening it up to Twitter is encouraging. All thoughts for improvement greatly appreciated.

Full post at this link…

ABC News to ‘Twitterview’ John McCain

From AllThingsD comes news that presidential runner-up John McCain will be interviewed by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos using Twitter.

ABC is calling it a Twitterview, but we like to think Journalism.co.uk’s own Twinterviews on @journalism_live may have provided some inspiration…

So was it the ‘Blogs Wot Won It’ for Barack?

So 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’:

Facebook Black Planet
MySpace Faithbase
YouTube Eons
Flickr Glee
Digg MiGente
Twitter MyBatanga
Eventful Asian Ave
LinkedIn DNC PartyBuilder

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?

CNN.com sees 400 per cent traffic spike by Tuesday afternoon

This 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:

  • CNN.com Live (with has four simultaneous live streams), had generated 1.6 million views domestically and internationally – seven times higher than an average full day.
  • Grant expects today’s (Wednesday’s) traffic to be even higher.
  • Grant said that election day concerns were centred on the site’s capacity to handle the traffic, but that it was coping fine so far.
  • Grant also discusses CNN’s mobile offerings and its live video feed available through AT&T and Sprint.

Tweeted debate: does it have any significance for democracy?

So, 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?

Washingtonpost.com: Bloggers break news of Sarah Palin’s pregnant daughter

Reports on the Daily Kos that John McCain’s deputy Sarah Palin was actually the grandmother and not the mother of her young son eventually exposed the fact that Palin’s daughter was pregnant.

But should such news be made public in this way? And are political parties having to react to too many ‘reports’ from the blogs?