Is Politico a news organization, a meme organization, or what?

By Zachary M. Seward

Bill Wasik begins his book, And Then There’s This, with a “plea to future historians.” Well, when the early history of online news is written, a crucial document will be the memo distributed at a Politico staff meeting on July 21, 2008. Written by the news site’s chief White House correspondent, Mike Allen, a veteran of Time and The Washington Post, it read in part:

We are not the AP or The New York Times…If we ONLY do what those two great organizations do, WE WILL NOT SURVIVE AND WE WON’T HAVE JOBS…OWNING THE MORNING is vital to our prosperity. Early links have a longer shelf life, and our journalism has more of an opportunity to shape the Washington agenda. We’re online by 5 a.m., promoting your stories and looking for fresh opportunities to drive conversation.

Later in the memo, Allen posed several criteria for determining whether a piece of news qualifies as a “STRONG POLITICO STORY,” including:

a) Would this be a “most e-mailed” story?…
d) Will a blogger be inspired to post on this story?…
g) Will my competition be forced to follow this?

By all of which, Allen meant: Will it spread? Keep reading »

In the news cycle, memes spread more like a heartbeat than a virus

By Zachary M. Seward

The New York Times reports today: “For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours, according to a new computer analysis of news articles and commentary on the Web during the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign.” By that measure, I’m past due in responding, but here’s why the Times has it wrong.

The study in question demonstrates a fascinating technique, borrowed from genetics research, for tracking memes in media coverage, and produces some surprising results that I’ll get to below. But part of the paper is based on a flawed methodology that totally discredits the findings highlighted by the Times. Here’s the illustration of that two-and-a-half-hour gap between peak coverage of memes — in this case, phrases from the 2008 presidential election — in the mainstream media and on blogs:

In order to determine whether a news source belongs on the red curve or the green one, the authors look to whether it’s indexed by Google News. If so, the source is labeled as “mainstream media.” But Google News indexes loads and loads of political blogs, from conservative Hot Air to liberal Talking Points Memo. It includes Daily Kos, Power Line, AMERICAblog, and the celebrity news site Just Jared. Even the Nieman Journalism Lab is in there, so by the study’s reckoning, you are currently consuming mainstream media.

So it may be true, as the Times reports on the front of its business section, that “the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow,” but the study doesn’t support that conclusion. What it finds is a surprisingly narrow gap between 20,000 prominent news sources, of all stripes, that are indexed in Google News and 1.6 million websites that don’t make the cut. Or, as Jon Kleinberg, an author of the study, told me: “This shows how important it is to look at blogs and news media as one single organism.”

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Why The Boston Globe missed the nanostory with Mitt Romney’s dog

By Zachary M. Seward

I’m reliably informed that the current issue of Vanity Fair contains a lengthy, engaging, and revealing profile of Sarah Palin, full of unflattering details like an email she wrote to friends and family in the voice of God, signed, “Your Heavenly Father.” But I must confess: I haven’t read the piece. I’ve read about it.

So it goes with lengthy magazine articles and the scarcity of time these days. I read what I can but, like most consumers of digital media, rely on blogs to brief me on the rest. For the Palin profile, I quickly digested a post by New York’s Daily Intel, which “pulled out the ten most unflattering ways that Palin was depicted in the article for your convenient perusal,” and scanned The Daily Beast’s “top 10 quotations from the nearly 10,000-word article.” (If there were 11 items of interest, well, I guess I’d have to read the piece.)

This new reality must drive the creators and publishers of long-form content nuts. Their nuanced reporting is reduced to atomized bits and peddled by rivals. But the key word is “reality,” as in unavoidable, and I wonder why publications like Vanity Fair don’t do more to serve casual readers. There’s no reason, except pride, that the magazine couldn’t have offered a precis or top-10 list to accompany the Palin piece.

In the video above, I talk to Bill Wasik about a similar situation that’s documented in his new book on viral culture, And Then There’s This. During the 2008 presidential campaign, The Boston Globe ran a 10-part profile of its hometown candidate, Mitt Romney, but the only piece of that reporting to catch much attention was the colorful tale of poor Seamus, the Romney family dog who was tied to the roof of a station wagon and made to suffer other indignities during a vacation in 1983.

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