In 2004, Democrat Howard Dean harnessed the power of Meetup and fundraised in small amounts from a large base of donors -- and finished third in Iowa.
In 2008, Democrat Barack Obama took online social media tools to new heights, won Iowa and his party's nomination, has raised obscene amounts of money, and may well be the president-elect of the United States by late Tuesday.
The NYT says not since John F. Kennedy became president in 1960 has a new technology had such an impact on a U.S. presidential election. But it also cautions that the old media remains powerful.
Shortly after 9 a.m. on Oct. 19, Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for president during the taping of “Meet the Press” on NBC. Within minutes, the video was on the Web.
But the clip was not rushed onto YouTube; it was MSNBC.com, the network’s sister entity online, that showed the video hours before television viewers on the West Coast could watch the interview for themselves.
Old media, apparently, can learn new media tricks. Not since 1960, when John F. Kennedy won in part because of the increasingly popular medium of television, has changing technology had such an impact on the political campaigns and the organizations covering them.
For many viewers, the 2008 election has become a kind of hybrid in which the dividing line between online and off, broadcast and cable, pop culture and civic culture, has been all but obliterated.
Many of the media outlets influencing the 2008 election simply were not around in 2004. YouTube did not exist, and Facebook barely reached beyond the Ivy League. There was no Huffington Post to encourage citizen reporters, so Mr. Obama’s comment about voters clinging to guns or religion may have passed unnoticed. These sites and countless others have redefined how many Americans get their political news.
When viewers settle in Tuesday night to watch the election returns, they will also check text messages for alerts, browse the Web for exit poll results and watch videos distributed by the campaigns. And many folks will let go of the mouse only to pick up the remote and sample an array of cable channels with election coverage — from Comedy Central to BBC America.
But as NBC’s decision to release the Powell clip early shows, the networks and their newspaper counterparts have not simply waited to be overtaken. Instead, they have made specific efforts to engage audiences with interactive features, allowing their content to be used in unanticipated ways, and in many efforts, breaking out of the boundaries of the morning paper and the evening newscast.
“Old media outlets — the networks, the newspapers — learned a lot of lessons from the last cycle and didn’t allow others to own the online space this time,” said Rick Klein, the senior political reporter for ABC News.
Please read the full article; it will be well worth your time.
Here's some other stats from it:
- Obama had 2.3 million members on his Facebook group
- Obama's famous speech on race, given in Philadelphia in March, has been viewed five million times.
- In the last week of October, the Obama campaign uploaded 70 videos to YouTube, many tailored to fights in individual battleground states
- Much of the video content on BarackObama.com wasn't just recycled TV ads, but content created specifically for the site
There are lessons in that. The U.S. media appear to be learning them:
To compete, major media companies had to change how they produced their coverage. Before almost every big interview — like ABC’s interview with John Edwards about his extramarital affair — the networks released excerpts on their Web sites.
“SNL” videos proved to be particularly popular online; Ms. Fey’s impressions were viewed more than 50 million times. “The idea that something can be seen more online than on TV, and arguably have more influence that way, is a tipping point,” Mr. Heyward said.
Politically oriented video, much of it topical and much of the juicier bits lifted from network programming, is everywhere on the Web. YouTube videos mentioning either Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain have been viewed 2.3 billion times, according to the measurement firm TubeMogul. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in October found that 39 percent of registered voters had watched campaign videos online.
“What is striking here is not the dominance of any one medium, but the integration of various channels,” said Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. By the time the conventions rolled around, some networks realized the game had changed. Ms. Couric christened her own YouTube channel and was turned loose in Web extras. But network news divisions are expensive operations based on a television business model. They can’t be run on the relatively small money that online advertising draws but they can’t compete for audiences if they ignore the Web.
“At a time when almost anyone can check voter turnout in certain neighborhoods in Cuyahoga County, I don’t think everyone is going to sit there and wait to be spoon-fed the election results in the order Brian Williams thinks is appropriate,” said Joan Walsh, the editor of Salon, referring to a closely watched county in Ohio.
Given the profound change in the media landscape in just four years, in 2012, voters will be following the election through news sites that have not been invented on platforms that cannot be anticipated. “There will be a lot more of me in 2012,” said Mayhill Fowler, the blogger for The Huffington Post who publicized Senator Obama’s “bitter” remarks.
Perhaps the only thing that could be predicted with any reliability is that, viewers who now watch cable news on a set that looks like the desktop — running streams of data framing the main page — while streaming video on a nearby laptop will probably be watching just one screen that can do all of those things.
“There was a palpable hunger for information and data about this election that has nothing to do with media,” said Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “Nobody reports, you decide.”