A lot has happened

Posted November 12th, 2008 at 12:56 AM in Journalism, Politics, Technology

This blog, which I had vowed to maintain, fell asleep as work got busy, and it stayed asleep as the election heated up.

Bad timing, I know.

Sen. Barack Obama defeated Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential race a week ago. It was truly moving to watch, even for a cynic like me. It seems like only yesterday that I had actually seen Obama so much in person — in high school multipurpose rooms and at moderately priced hotel conference centers — that I was tired of him. Now he is the President-elect.

Change is coming to the country, and it is coming to this blog. My specified mission here — to examine and document intersections between politics, journalism, and technology — remains unchanged, but I plan to pay more attention to the technology piece. I will try to offer some practical advice based on my experience retooling and subsequently maintaining several high-traffic news sites for the day job.

I promise not to abandon politics, which is still my favorite thing to talk about in real life, but frankly, there is less politics to talk about these days.

Here’s to better days. I promise, if you subscribe to my RSS feed now, you won’t regret it.

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Judging other magazines by their covers

Posted July 15th, 2008 at 2:12 PM in Journalism, Politics

The cover art accompanying Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker profile of Barack Obama’s political ascension has provoked a frenzy of media self-flagellation.

It’s clear that the cover is satire, and should any conservatives attempt to cite it as factual rather than ironic, the joke will be on them. There are a lot of Americans who believe Obama is a Muslim, and there are a lot of Americans who believe that Michelle Obama is a radicalized, angry Black woman.

But those who buy into that false narrative aren’t reading the New Yorker, and it’s obvious mockery like the cover below that will help put an end to it, as long as enough people see it in the proper context. Over the past three days, I think everyone has heard about it in the right context.

I actually think it’s the subtler magazine covers that present the most danger for misinterpretation. This week’s Newsweek cover (above, left) asks what it thinks is a reasonable question, but it leaves the answer to the inside pages that the vast majority of Americans will never see.

It’s not the answer to the question of “What does Barack Obama believe?” that will drive false narratives about the Illinois senator’s religion and patriotism, it’s the constant, open-ended questioning of it that is most dangerous.

The New Yorker mocks those who question Obama’s patriotism and values, while Newsweek reinforces the question’s relevance. Which do you think is worse?

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Dept. of "refighting the same fights"

Posted July 8th, 2008 at 7:07 PM in Politics

If one fact of Barack Obama’s candidacy sent a tingle up my leg, it was the possibility that for the first time in my lifetime, a presidential election might not come down to a fight between those who fought in Vietnam and those who burned their draft cards. For somebody who lived through that era, maybe this dynamic of every presidential race I can remember is hardly noticeable, but for me it has become tiresome.

For John McCain, it might be salvation. This is his new ad, which spends five seconds trying to imply that Obama would have burned his draft card, if only he had been there. Will it be enough?

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Who benefits from the pro-Hillary, anti-Obama movement online?

Posted July 7th, 2008 at 11:41 PM in Politics, Technology

There has been a lot of chatter about the supposedly large contingent of Hillary Clinton supporters who refuse to back Barack Obama in the 2008 general election. They’re a vocal group, but it turns out some of them might have ulterior motives.

Yesterday, I happened upon IOwnMyVote.com, one of the many online petition sites organized around the anti-Obama Clinton supporters. The petition asks for basic contact information, just as all online petitions do, becuase online petitions are really only useful to organizations insofar as they help build up an email list. (For more on that, see below.)

But the petition’s owner doesn’t keep the contact information for himself; he or she forwards it to the presidential campaigns. Sounds like it’s supposed to be nonpartisan and honest, right? Wrong. Only one of the candidates — John McCain — stands to gain anything from the arrangement. Read the rest of this entry »

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In politics, the value of an email address is difficult to quantify

Posted July 5th, 2008 at 8:38 PM in Politics, Technology

One of the most popular strategies for selling something online involves the use of an opt-in email list. Rather than pay to send somebody to a page where they have two choices — buy product or don’t buy product — you give them a third option: sign up for more information. You can incentivize signups in many ways (e.g., “free 10-page information pack sent instantly to your email,” or “sign up to receive a coupon for 10% off”), and you get to contact anybody who signs up by email a theoretically unlimited number of times.

Conventional wisdom is that it takes 7 “asks” to get a “yes” from an average customer buying an average product. I don’t know where that number came from, but it’s still true that an email opt-in is worth money to a seller. And most sellers can quantify exactly how much a new email address is worth to them by taking their profit on a sale and multiplying it by the likelihood that somebody will buy their product after receiving their series of automatically generated emails. For instance, I’ve run marketing projects where I’ve assumed the value of an email address to be about $1. But I was selling crap and making crap money, so that number can get significantly higher.

In politics, it’s harder to quantify the value of an email address. Barack Obama’s proprietary social networking web site has about 1 million members, his online donor rolls have swelled to over 1.5 million, and the total size of his email list is unknown (GOP tech guru Patrick Ruffini thinks it’s 4 to 8 million). What we do know is that only a small fraction of supporters on a candidate’s email list will ever make a donation. Whether we’re talking 1% or 15% depends on a lot of variables for which there aren’t obvious controls, but Obama’s ratio of email list recipient to donor is almost certainly higher than any candidate on his level. Read the rest of this entry »

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