mikehuckabee.com: Feel the Surge

With all the breathless splatter over Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s improbably virulent web campaign, other contentders’ efforts to leverage 2.0 in ‘08 tend to get lost.

But political web watchers are linking the surge in the polls of the genial Mike Huckabee to his wise use of the web. Writing for the techPresident site, Zephyr Teachout recently counted the ways Huckabee’s been using the web wisely.

The short list:

1. Enlightened use of UGC, including videos that have some sport with ol’ Huck

2. Holding blogger conference calls

3. Leaving typos in this blog

4. No flash, no splash, kind of dorky big buttons and navigation.

Note how all of these things help establish the candidate’s authenticity. His team is using the web to make Huckabee more “real”–not just to preach to the converted.

And speaking of which, you won’t want to miss the video, posted just today, of the good governor and immigration advisor Chuck Norris discussing. . . faith.

Reader’s Digest 2.0? Yes

Reader’s Digest, that endearingly lower-middlebrow American institution, has been largely overlooked in the world of print-to-digital transformation. Who can blame us? What could the folks who brought us such gems as fast-reading edits of James Michener and articles like “I am Joe’s Islets of Langerhans” have to contribute to the world of digital publishing?

Fast answer: More than you’d suspect.

Check out the following:

• An Election 08: “Grade the Candidates” tool. Rate each candidate on a 4.0 scale. (Results so far seem to suggest, unsurprisingly, that rd.com users lean right.) It’s got usability problems, but it’s a worthy entry in the ‘08 2.0 derby. Even its exclusion of Internet diva Ron Paul carries a certain RD charm. Whether the producers simply don’t get out enough to know who Ron Paul is, or figure he’s not important enough to include, is inconsequential. You’ve got to admire its innocent devotion to mainstream civics.
• The home page’s Daily Top5, a module of that eerily preserves the sweet, dorky sensibility of the publication using interactive and traditional media: carefully selected YouTube videos [today's is a comedy routine making fun of daily mom-isms], “addictive games,” a [network] TV show of the night, etc.
• A front-page mix that includes heart-warming inspirational stories, the expected pre-Martha how-do content, user-submitted photos and the display of such utterly safe celebrities as Tom Hanks.
• It even markets its podcasts as “RD Out Loud”–a sort of digital-audio version of the magazine’s beloved “large print edition.”

Sure, it’s easy for us new media snobs to make fun of Reader’s Digest. But if there is an example of a publication that has prudently adopted 2.0 technologies to extend its brand online–while preserving the publication’ s sensibilities precisely–I’d like to hear about it.

L.A. Times’s Talent Raid on LAist Blog

The L.A. Times, which to date has been something of a middling adopter to digital journalism, has hired a blog editor, Tony Pierce, to spur and grow the Times’ current stable of 25 bloggers. (A tip o’ the fez to our friends at The Bivings Report, whose item on this brought it to my attention.)

While other newspapers have brought in folks to corral in-house bloggers, it’s been at least partly to keep the writers in line, make sure they abide by Newsroom Standards–to provide adult supervision and logistics management, essentially.

What appears to be significant here: the talent coming in is the editor of LAist, and he’s the third LAister to be hired away by the Times: In July sports and entertainment bloggers were called up to The Show.

It’s tempting to think that the Times is going native with these hires, making a full commitment to embracing the blogosphere.

Well, maybe.

LAist, one of  a cluster of 14 metro blogs around North America, is fairly tame and often lame: Local event listings, notes about goings on, funny pictures of animals, photo of the day, some gentle pokes at cops and mayors, that sort of thing. It hardly has the brainy, anti-establishment edge of even a Slate or Salon. It does little difficult reporting, as a journalist might recognize it.

What is interesting is that Pierce is coming in to lead the Times’ effort, not just blog. It will be interesting to see how a guy who has never borne a stain of ink will handle the reporters who write most of the Times’ blogs.

As Pierce leaves, he submitted to an “exit” interview with two of his LAist colleagues:

Andy: What drives your desire to manage the “doubters” blogs, i.e. mainstream media? Can an LA Times succeed with a broad selection of blogs on a level with the Gothamists and Gawkers of the world?

Tony: I believe that newspaper blogs will dominate the Technorati Top 100 in the next 5 years. Simply due to the fact that they have the best writers, they are the ones actually gathering news, and they have the best photographers, and the tightest infrastructure. They’re doomed for success as long as they stop fighting the inevitable. So I am looking forward to working with real pros.

Also, all links end up going back to an MSM source - not to a blog, therefore what that MSM source does with that movement is critical. Right now the buck stops there. What would happen if it points to one of its internal blogs that can provide more info? If they did that properly it would be the death of fools like Drudge who have fewer quality links, less credibility, and a clearly obvious and clownish agenda. “Hillary is a lesbo” has been his drumbeat all week. That’s something even he doesn’t believe, and it’s proof that he’s not serious about politics.

Huffington Post showed up out of nowhere when no one asked for another political blog and is now getting more hits than Drudge mostly because they are serious about politics and they’re echoing what regular Americans actually believe. Therefore if the MSM simply organized themselves a tad better, they could use that credibility and the natural flow of blog traffic to fuel their online ventures.

Chief blogger Pierce is already talking out of both sides of his mouth–oozing enthusiasm about the “best writers” and “real pros” in the newsroom, about de-throning the thuggish blockhead Matt Drudge and embracing the “serious about politics” mission of the HuffPo.

So is the talent raid on LAist a brave move by the Times to power itself the blogosphere? Or a safe move to give it some digital cred while it fights to maintain the status quo?

Times will tell.

AP2.0h. . .That’s Actually Interesting

Excellent story today by Cate Dody in the New York Times explaining how the Associated Press plans to remake itself for a world where its longtime cash cow, the newspaper industry, goes dry.

Its AP2.0 plans involve something called The Digital Cooperative. The pinko-dystopia vibe derives from the fact that AP is not a for-profit enterprise, and it’s doing the Full Digital Dive to position itself for the future. Apparently the plan calls for shifting some editing jobs to reporting jobs so AP can crank out more content, some of it of the multimedia persuasion.

The AP’s digital re-org may help answer three key questions facing those pondering the future of journalism:

How much value to editors add to the journalistic equation? Editors may argue that having fewer editors handling more reporting, as the AP2.0 plan calls for, is a recipe for lousy journalism. We’ll see. (I say this as a longtime newspaper editor myself.) Alas, I’m not sure how one would judge the degradation or improvement of AP reporting over time. The journalistic snobocracy looks down on AP as middling house-brand news as it is. But as a guy who is involved with a web site that rigorously grades news reports in the health niche, I can tell you AP stories rarely suck and often rank right up there with, and often above, the swank dailies‘.)

As news continues to go multimedia, how much of a market will there be for multimedia pre-packs? This is precisely the product AP plans to have its co-op fieldhands produce. I’m guessing the answer is: A really big market. Once you surf below the top dozen news web sites, the amount of original, creative multimedia work done in middle America newsland declines dramatically. I’m guessing there will be a strong demand for plug-and-play multimedia packages that can deliver page views for the web site of the Democrat-Chronicle-Journal Reader and Advertiser without the publisher having to hire a single intern who knows from Dreamweaver.

Can AP bravely draw on the lessons of its own failure? Earlier this year AP shuttered the youth-oriented multimedia venture called called asap. A much beloved product (at least, and perhaps only, by me), asap had some hot young hands doing inspired, if wildly inconsistent, work. Its business model was a failure; it sucked cash from the corpus of AP like a hagfish. Fine. Digital suits often talk about how they need to fund new media experiments, some of which will succeed and others fail but provide lessons for the future. It’s good to see AP bounce back with a new multimedia product. Let’s hope they haven’t leaked all of the fun out of it.

As a co-op, AP differs fundamentally from the newspapers it has long served. As the New York Times article points out, it does not have to labor under Wall Street projections or shareholder pressure. Relieved of the duty of delivering 20 percent margins to owners, it may have elbow room to operate in the digital world that newspapers do not.

Unlike newspapers, after all, AP is intentionally non-profit.

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