Thursday, August 6, 2009

Obama and digital media

New York Magazine has a great article in its current issue by Jennifer Senior about Obama's media strategy that sheds some interesting light on how fast-paced digital media can be managed effectively. I guess it should come as no surprise that the guy whose team rewrote the book on grassroots campaigning using new media should also throw out the old rules on how a president must comport himself via mass media.

First, Senior notes the ubiquity of President Obama: fifteen town-hall meetings; 800 Flickr photo-stream; four prime-time press conferences (the same number G. W. Bush held throughout his entire eight years); a video message to the people of Iran; a speech in Cairo beamed live througout the Middle East and the world; an appearance on Jay Leno's Tonight Show. Senior gets a great quote from Ed Gillespie, former adviser to G.W. Bush: "This is president as content provider. It's like when Rosie O'Donnell had a show and a magazine and a blog."

During the campaign Obama was a genuine cultural phenomenon. Even more so than the Clintons were in the early 1990s when they ushered in the first Boomer administration and the Bill and Hillary partnership riveted (and divided) the nation (as it still does today). Sometimes I personally found the People Magazine embrace of Candidate Obama a little unsettling: were the young people who entranced by him ready for the long-haul of supporting him through governing? But the strategy of the campaign was brilliant. Reagan was able to change the course of the nation through the use of his personality. Senior quotes Rahm Emanuel: "There's a brand to it." And the brand seems to be helping President Obama keep momentum and support for his policies that are on their own very controversial: the auto industy bailout and health care reform.

But back to my main point about what Senior reveals. This constant stream of content via the President flies in the face of the first rule of Presidential communications: don't devalue the cachet of the President by overexposure. But this golden rule was formed in an age of three networks and one or two "national" newspapers. The news cycle back then was stately. Senior quotes Bill Burton a White House deputy press secretary: "Even when I was on the Kerry campaign in 2004, something that showed up on the front page of the New York Times would drive a lot of the news that day and a least oa couple of broadcasts that night. And it's rare that anything does that now."

And this is the heart of Senior's analysis: "[T]hose who think the White House has overdone it are missing the point. In today's media environment, ubiquity is not the same as overexposure. It's a deliberate strategy. And it's critical to any understanding of the Obama presidency."

It seems that the fracturing of the media and the diverse ways in which the public gets its information keep the public from overdosing on President Obama. In addition, Senior points to Obama's preference for deep analysis and "moral instruction" in his extensive, carefully crafted, and disciplined delivery of his remarks. She calls him "professor-in-chief, preacher-in-chief, father-in-chief." As an example she offers his 37 minute speech about race following the Reverend Wright imbroglio. Despite its length and careful reasoning (or perhaps because of it) within 48 hours more than 1.6 million viewer watched it and the video became the most watched piece on YouTube for that period.

Senior quotes Clay Shirkey, the NYU author of "Here Comes Everybody." "Sound bites were a product of media scarcity, when public figures had a finite amount of time and space to make their points. Now we live in a world of 'Publish then filter," he points out, rather than "filter, then publish," a time when the question is 'Why not film this?' rather than 'Why film this?"

Nate Silver, the founder of the influential fivethirtyeight.com, goes further and describes this as an active rather than passive strategy. Senior quotes him: "If you speak and leave out details, bloggers will fill them in." But the key here, according to Senior, is the discipline with which Obama delivers the message. In speaking at the National Archives about the treatment of detainees: "By the time he'd finished speaking, he'd used the word 'moral' twice, 'principle' ten times, and 'value' fifteen."

The entire article contains much, much more and is well worth reading: http://nymag.com/news/politics/58199/

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