Ari Melber has written a great synthesis for The Nation about the new study “A Tale of Two Blogospheres” produced by a consortium of researchers from Harvard, Yale and Berkeley.

The study details the the structure (and resulting impact) of the left vs. right blogosphere or as they put it, “evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation across political blogs.” This study completely coincides with the theories we lay out and the stories (and lessons learned) of Firedoglake, Feministing and Talking Points Memo that we detail out in our book Beyond The Echo Chamber: Reshaping Politics Through Networked Progressive Media.

Here are a few excerpts from Melber’s piece.

“One of the most striking findings is structural: liberal blogs provide audience participation options at triple the rate of conservative sites. That means visitors to progressive sites are more empowered to contribute entire posts to the “front page,” and more likely to have their contributions or comments highlighted before potentially hundreds of thousands of readers.

According to the authors, the netroots’ early embrace of deeper participation platforms, coupled with progressive bloggers interest in mobilizing fundraising and specific actions, helped prime the tactics and habits that supported the Democrats’ later web dominance (see chart).

The survey data does show that progressive bloggers were far more demanding of their readers.

One out of three liberal sites made direct fundraising pitches, and almost half asked readers to take some political action, according to a section of the study analyzing the top sixty-five blogs. On the right, however, only one out of twenty blogs pushed fundraising, and fewer than one out of five issued “calls to action.”

In the book, we tell the “impact story” of Firedoglake in a chapter titled “Assemble the Progressive Choir.” It demonstrates how FDL has successfully built a site that combines analysis, great acts of journalism, transparency, direct relationships between the bloggers and the community, a community forum, calls for action and fundraising (for the site itself and for political campaigns) to become one of the most successful progressive political blogs today.

I hope that both the blogosphere and the rapidly evolving legacy progressive media take heed from both the study and our book and continues with the much needed experimentation and implementation of community engagement, building and mobilization that will continue to build the overall impact of their journalism and messaging. It’s good for business. It’s good for impact.

This image summarizes the significant differences between the left and right blogosphere analyzed in the new study, “A Tale of Two Blogospheres.” (Click for larger image.)

Cross Posted at The Media Consortium.

A few weeks ago, The Media Consortium held its annual member meeting in NYC. Despite the raging blizzard that hit the city the day of the meeting (what timing!) over 70 individuals from more than two dozen organizations traveled from across the country for the two day event. This meeting marked the fifth anniversary of The Media Consortium, which was a great time to reflect on where we’ve been as an organization and a sector and how we are going to move forward together. The meeting gave us a sneak peek of the big changes to expect for the progressive media sector during the next few years.

For many of those who were been present at the first meeting of the consortium in March 2005, and watched/helped the consortium evolve to where it is now, this meeting marked a significant change. A few years ago, the idea of editorial collaboration among members was a big no-no. Imagine exposing sunlight to vampires. That’s how quick some ran away from that conversation. A few years ago, the understanding around community building/engagement was frowned upon (not just by media consortium members, but by the journalism sector at large). But my, how perceptions have changed.

Now the ideas of collaboration and engagement are not just viewed as important, but are seen as essential to the future success, impact and sustainability of the progressive media sector. These topics were a major focus for the meeting agenda and in small-group and one-on-one conversations among meeting attendees. This drastic change has come about for two reasons.

1) Technology has broken down the barriers of collaboration, fostered more relationships among media producers, and encouraged their actual engagement and communication with their users.

2) The economic situation facing many organizations has given them no choice but to find new creative, collaborative ways to work together and with their users. This may be the only good thing that has come out of the economic troubles that journalism organizations are facing.

2010–>2015
The Media Consortium performed an illuminating exercise with our members where we asked them to project what kind of media organizations they would like to evolve into over the next five years. As a baseline, I laid out four journalism “sectors” that I see developing now and in the future. I created short definitions for each of these sector and their corresponding roles/values each of these sectors provide in a short slideshow.

Next, I asked members to place themselves within these four sectors in terms of 1) where they see themselves now and 2) where they see themselves by 2015.

In 2010, most of the cluster of organizations placed themselves in the “Pure Play” journalism field, but by 2015, this sector is empty. Looking ahead five years, most groups formed a cluster around “Hybrid Media Making” and “Journalism + Action.” Drastic, no?

For many journalism producers and organizations, this is a big break from the traditional role of the press to only “observe and report.” This shift into working/engaging with a community and deliberately moving them towards action will probably be seen by some as the opposite of journalism and its last steps towards dissolution. Instead, I think this reflects the correct next step for progressive media makers. While retaining their journalistic integrity, progressive media makers must demonstrate to their allies AND to their users the social and political impact of their journalism. Users (networked consumers of information/news) are no longer passive receivers of content. They want to be active players in producing and distributing the content. More and more, they also want help in knowing what to do with the content.

What’s Next
Progressive media makers will have to decide for themselves how far they want to take the “action” part of their work. Will they create spaces for users to self-organize? Connect them more strategically with organizations like Care2 or Change.org that suggest and organize actions? Or are there other options to pursue? Time will tell as TMC members and others experiment in this area.

In fact, TMC will be working and experimenting with our members on this idea and others, including moving into mobile, editorial collaboration, revenue generation opportunities, community engagement and more through our 2010 Incubation Lab program. We’ll be reviewing and reporting on the results of these experiments as we implement them. So keep checking in to see how the progressive media transforms itself from the inside out for a new media landscape. We’re sowing the seeds now for progressive media sector of 2015.

Neiman Journalism Lab has a great post this a.m. in reaction to a new Google Lab release: a Google News timeline view,:

which gives users the ability to see and scroll through headlines, photos and news excerpts by day/week/month/year. The sources of this data can also be customized to include not just traditional news sources but also Wikipedia, sports scores, blogs, etc. It’s a fascinating way of interpreting the news — not something that is likely going to replace a regular old Google News headline view, but an additional way of looking at things.

One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this latest Google effort at delivering the news, and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this? (I’m not the only one to wonder this). Why not a newspaper, or even a collective like Associated Press (which seems to prefer threats to creativity)? Isn’t delivering the news in creative and interesting ways that appeal to readers what we are supposed to be doing?”

I had the EXACT SAME REACTION when I saw the Google Timeline yesterday. Progressive media peeps–it’s time to put the creativity hat on. So I have a proposal, something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

I think we should do a multimedia timeline of our collective economic coverage over the past 8 years–maybe focused on a single issue or two (i.e. predatory lending, Wall Street regulation) and input coverage from video, text, audio, blogs, reports, etc. from key progressive media sources. I think this effort could do a couple things:
a) Everyone keeps asking where the financial press was during this economic crisis. Well, the progressive media has been reporting furiously on the economic meltdown for years. Let’s show it. Let’s prove that what the “lefty” press was reporting and predicting came true.
b) We’re wondering how to tell this very complex and sprawling story to our audiences in a way that makes sense of the past and sets the stage for future reporting. A visual, searchable component that connects the reporting together into a larger narrative and makes it comprehensive for our audiences is a critical informative tool.
c) The opportunity factors: There’s an opportunity to start playing/integrating new storytelling and journalism formats. (We need to start figuring it out soon). This is an opportunity to leverage and utilize individual content into a collective, larger story and the opportunity to reach a potentially larger audience. And this could be an opportunity to have our audience be part of the creative process. Can our audience crowdsource to research, identify the reporting to go in the timeline?

What do you think of this idea? What would you add or argue with?

First of all–a big OMG. Jess was interviewed by my media crush, Henry Jenkins. SO JEALOUS.

Ok-now onto the serious stuff. Jess’s white paper, Public Media 2.0, is flying around like hot cakes and is getting a lot of praise. It’s pretty awesome to watch. (Of course, she deservies it) You should read the interview the whole way through. But just in case, here’s a little taste:

Q: Can you share your definition of Public Media 2.0? How does it differ from what you are calling “legacy media”? What are the biggest factors shaping this change?

A: “Legacy media” is top-down, one-to-many media: print, television, radio, even static web pages. We’re advancing a more dynamic, relevant definition of public media–one that’s participatory, focused on informing and mobilizing publics around shared issues.

“Publics” can be a slippery term: we don’t simply mean audiences, or the general populace (i.e. “the public interest”). Instead, it’s a term based on the work of theorists like John Dewey and JÃrgen Habermas, who suggest that media are intrinsic to democracy itself. Publics are what keep the powers-that-be accountable–government, corporate or other–by investigating them, discussing them, and deliberating about how to deal with them. Publics are networks of people–often ad hoc, sometimes organized–with a shared civic purpose. Media content, tools and platforms are needed for publics to form, because face-to-face communication is too inefficient–especially now that we all operate within a global economy.

The right wing built up a powerful echo chamber over the last few decades. In contrast, progressives have built dynamic networks of information and communication over the last few years.

For the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList.

Proof of a vast liberal media conspiracy?

Not at all, says Ezra Klein, the 24-year-old American Prospect blogging wunderkind who formed JournoList in February 2007. “Basically,” he says, “it’s just a list where journalists and policy wonks can discuss issues freely.”

But some of the journalists who participate in the online discussion say — off the record, of course — that it has been a great help in their work. On the record, The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin acknowledged that a Talk of the Town piece — he won’t say which one — got its start in part via a conversation on JournoList. And JLister Eric Alterman, The Nation writer and CUNY professor, said he’s seen discussions that start on the list seep into the world beyond.

Oh my god–Toobin used a conversation he was involved in as the genesis for a news piece? Stop the presses! Liberal Media Conspiracy Alert!

Seriously folks, how do you think half of journalism, reporting and analysis occurs? From conversations, information sharing, bouncing ideas off each, arguments and more. J-list is great for all those things. It’s not an “echo chamber.” No one on this list serve is telling anyone what to write about. No one is planning out how talking points are going to be distributed and bombard the public from all angles.

The list serve is just a small, small example of how today’s media system works. It’s a network. There are private and public networks forming, connecting, dissolving, and reforming every day. Some are sustained, others serve their purpose and disappear. It’s part of the media ecology that we now live in for people to connect, share, and discuss. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s human nature.

In this case, J-List is a private conversation among as diverse a group you can get of political journalists, professors and bloggers. And if I find them too inside-the-beltway one day, I turn to my other networks: Facebook, feminist list servs, and Twitter to get other perspectives and ideas. Progressives have been much more quick to adapt and integrate these different online networks into their daily lives, making it seem far less sinister than others would perceive them.

Calderone, of course, hits up the right for their take on J-list and gets a quote from “Michael Goldfarb, a former McCain staffer and conservative blogger.”

“There is nothing comparable on the right. E-mail conversations among bloggers, journalists and experts on our side tend to be ad hoc,” Goldfarb said. “The JournoList thing always struck me as a little creepy.”

Creepy?? The right created, built, and implemented the very definition of a political echo chamber over the last few decades. That’s creepy. Maybe the fact that they don’t talk to one another and share ideas is one of the major reasons the GOP is in a state of collapse. Maybe they should try it out. These are smart people, surely they can figure out how to set up a google group list serve, right?

Amy Goodman had a great interview a few days ago with Jane Mayer, author of The New Yorker’s The Insiders: How John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin. . The transcript is up at AlterNet. Mayer traces the Palin promotion path–as the new Alaska Governor to the Republican Vice Presidential candidate. There’s a lot of interesting info in the article, but I wanted to pull out two main points.

1) The conservative media helped propel Palin into the national spotlight and basically land the V-P position. They were able to do this because they a) have a successful echochamber and b) their influence is so strong in the beltway, DC circles–the politicos listen to them. This is a stark contrast with the innerworkings and influence of the progressive media.

It all started out with the heads of the conservative media meeting Sarah in her own home in a sort of skewed version of “Who’s coming to lunch?”

The contingent featured three of The Weekly Standard ’s top writers: William Kristol, the magazine’s Washington-based editor, who is also an Op-Ed columnist for the Times and a regular commentator on “Fox News Sunday”; Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor and the co-host of “The Beltway Boys,” a political talk show on Fox News; and Michael Gerson, the former chief speechwriter for President Bush and a Washington Post columnist.

This got the ball rolling and when the contingent headed back to D.C., the Palin praise train started rolling out of the station. Mayer notes that many of the lunch guests had become full blown cheerleaders.

The most ardent promoter, however, was Kristol, and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska’s political circles. According to Simpson, Senator Stevens told her that “Kristol was really pushing Palin” in Washington before McCain picked her. Indeed, as early as June 29th, two months before McCain chose her, Kristol predicted on “Fox News Sunday” that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket.” He described her as “fantastic,” saying that she could go one-on-one against Obama in basketball, and possibly siphon off Hillary Clinton’s supporters. He pointed out that she was a “mother of five” and a reformer. “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin,” he said. The moderator, Chris Wallace, finally had to ask Kristol, “Can we please get off Sarah Palin?”

The next day, however, Kristol was still talking about Palin on Fox. “She could be both an effective Vice-Presidential candidate and an effective President,” he said. “She’s young, energetic.”

But as Mayer noted in her article, by February 2008 the “the chorus of conservative pundits for Palin was loud enough for the mainstream media to take note. Chris Cillizza, reporting for the Web site of the Washington Post, interviewed Palin and asked her if she’d accept an offer to be McCain’s running mate.” Palin demurred at the time, but her star was on the rise. During the V-P selection process, McCain REALLY wanted his good buddy Joe Lieberman, but his political operatives gave him the big “talk to the hand,” noting Joe (the Senator) was too liberal on domestic issues and sent him in the direction of a little-known, arch conservative, charming woman from Alaska. And the rest is history.

I find this fascinating for a few reasons. One, I don’t know of any traditional progressive media outlets or individuals who from the ground up, will actively promote and then crown potential candidates in such a way. The progressive media speculates, bets and discusses to death the pros and cons of various candidate options. When they feel ready (and if they are able), they will endorse. The progressive blogosphere has actually started to fill this gap by actively promoting and raising funds for candidates across the country, but the influence beyond the chorus is unclear.

When you look at the sphere of influence that the conservative publications have within their own party and the mainstream media, it makes you stop for a second to ponder the potential. But maybe that’s the corrupting influence of power overtaking me. The most important take away for me is that the conservative media has made sure that the beltway establishment doesn’t ignore them (or can’t, even if they want to.) The progressive media is starting to move in that direction, but still has a long way to go to have the same level of influence.

2) The other major point of this article that really struck me was the efforts by one man–Adam Brickley and where he came from. Mayer tells Goodman that Brickley was one of the main individuals that lifted Palin up above the masses.

Brickley, who is just out of college, and he is a staunch conservative, he’s looking for somebody who could add some pep to the Republican ticket, and he particularly is worried about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as, you know, a possible combination. So, anyway, he’s looking for a female. And he starts with Wikipedia, and he just looks for all the females in the Republican Party. And he told — I interviewed him — he says at some point, you know, he couldn’t find anybody good, and then he thinks, oh, what about that lady that just got elected in Alaska? So he looks up things about Sarah Palin and sees that she’s considered kind of this rising star.

And so, he starts a blog that’s called Sarah Palin for Vice President Blog. And it starts pushing Palin and gets picked up by many other conservative blogs and then finally works its way into kind of conservative radio, Rush Limbaugh, and the American Spectator, conservative magazines. So there’s this sort of growing groundswell.

Ok-great. We’ve heard the story of the lone ranger become a powerful powerbroker in the blogosphere before. And we love it. But I find this nugget much more interesting.

Mayer says that Brickley has “gone to the Leadership Institute, which is an organization that Morton Blackwell, an evangelical Christian, founded a couple decades ago to train sort of cadres of the right wing…. He’s also received scholarships from various right-wing organizations. He currently is living in a dormitory that’s part of the Heritage Foundation here in Washington, which is another big right-wing think tank. You know, he’s been trained in how to kind of help the conservative movement and how to become part of it. So, he’s pushing Palin, and his blog gets a lot of traffic. And so, there’s kind of this nexus of these forces coming together, both of which are really Washington forces that are pushing Palin.”

The training of young, media savvy progressive political activists is in full swing, but we are still CLEARLY far behind them in the active caring and feeding of them. The conservatives give their young leaders a career path. We give them fits and starts. This is not a new or brilliant notion, it’s just one I wanted to reinforce.

All in all–I’m not interested in the progressive media becoming king or queen makers, but I am interested in determining the means and infrastructure for raising its influence among the individuals and groups that are. What are the first steps? It would actually be interesting to survey D.C. insiders to see what progressive media they consume and why. Who wants to work with me on that???

You decide…

The amazing Rebecca Traister has a great article about the politicizing of daytime TV during this election cycle.

The timing of this article was great, because just yesterday I was telling Jessica about the how the The View has been a hotbed of political debate and amazing interviews–including the now-infamous grilling of Sen. John McCain. Jess gave me a look of, “huh?” Today I’m like, “See, See!”

Jezebel also makes a key point about this phenomenon:

Obviously, a huge part of the appeal of The View is that the women on the panel are much more accessible to the viewing public than a wonky news anchor on CNN or even the more partisan MSNBC and Fox News. The one danger — and this is a criticism I’ve heard aimed at satirical shows like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show — is the possibility that a show like The View is a person’s only source of political news. However, I’d imagine that anyone who looks to Babs and the team for their sole political fix probably wouldn’t be reading anything about the election otherwise, so perhaps it’s better that they get information in a less than serious way than not at all.

This is an interesting article from MediaShift on digg’s evolution from a site mostly focused on technology stories to expanded issues, including their now most popular section–politics. The biggest complaint from some users is the liberal leanings of the posts (but maybe that just shows the organizing savvy and advanced use of technology by liberal media producers and their audiences? Hmmm?). Of course, there is also a nod to the tech-savvy of the “Ron Paulites.”

But the article also tells the story of AJ Wysocki, who was turned onto digg and social story sharing because of his affiliation to the liberal media outlet, The Young Turks. (Long quote from article, but I thought it was a great little case study. More below the excerpt…)

AJ Wysocki, 27, has only been a member and reader of Digg since June. He opened his account because a liberal political radio show he frequently listens to, The Young Turks, enlisted him as a “web soldier” and charged him with promoting the content of the show online.

“They were looking for people to do stuff on Digg and Facebook and MySpace,” he told me in a phone interview. “So I basically took Digg. What that meant is that every day I go on and submit video clips they do on Digg, and I also submit all the blog posts they write. That’s how I got started on the site really.”

Wysocki became a heavy listener of “The Young Turks” after the 2004 election; it was then that he grew increasingly interested in politics, and he followed the hosts as the program traveled from Sirius Satellite Radio to Air America and then later when it was dropped from the liberal radio network and became an independent entity. When they asked him to help them promote content on the social news site, he only had a vague idea of what it was.

“I’ve seen the little icon, because I read Huffington Post a lot, and I saw that little Digg icon but I never really looked at it,” Wysocki said. “And then I visited it and I thought this is a good idea because you can really build hype. If someone has an interesting story and you have enough friends to vote on it, it’s kind of like democracy. If you really like it then a lot of people see it and then it gets to the front page and a whole bunch more people see it.”

In the short time that he’s been a user of the site he has become a heavy reader, eventually expanding his submissions to include content not created by the Young Turks. In the process, a few of his submissions have ended up on the coveted front page.

Curious about how The Young Turks had engaged the young Wysocki to become their “web soldier”, I went on an investigation (i.e. visited their site) and saw that they had the specific link “Promote” that details out ways for their audience members to market and support the program through social networking and sharing. For example, they tell audience members what to do with Digg:

Digg our podcast and our video clips
Help get our podcast on the top of the news podcast page on Digg. Vote for our podcast on Digg here.
Don’t forget to Digg our daily clips, found on our Web site or YouTube.
Why stop at Digg? Don’t be shy. You can also support the show by ranking our clips, videos, and blogs through Google Trackback, Technorati Trackback, del.icio.us, and Reddit. So start clicking!

Now, for many of us in the media world, this is pretty elementary stuff. But how many of us explicitly ask and describe for our audience members how to share the info and what the result will be ? Most of us just have the little icons on the bottom of our posts. Maybe many of us think that our audience members already know what to do with these buttons and what the results will be, but if the story of A.J. is a good example, that’s clearly not the case. So the lesson is: If it seems so simple, it’s stupid to do–then it’s a probably a good idea.

So–oh yeah. If you’re reading–go digg this post! The little button is the first one on the left. And post to delicious and share on Facebook and, well… you get the point.

In today’s Salon, Rick Perlstein (fellow Chicagoan and author of Nixonland) has a fascinating interview with Thomas Frank–author of the hit (and great example of high impact) What’s the Matter With Kansas? and the new, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. The interview hones in on specific stories from Frank’s new book on the rise of conservative power over the last 100 years, including examples of how the right economically benefits from both fighting the left AND (ironically) subsidies and some interesting tidbits about Jack Abramoff’s ties to South Africa apartheid.

At the end of the interview, Frank has his own take on the ways of the MSM as they fight the “liberal bias” label falsely foisted upon them by the right. Frank notes some MSM journalists run for the caves to hide from the label by speaking in equal measures about the two parties. To me, it’s not about equal time with either party (although that clearly doesn’t happen), it’s about journalists rooting out the systematic development, power and corruption by or of either party. This is also what Frank alludes to in the quote below.

What they prefer instead is to talk about “both parties,” and always to assume that everything in American politics is done simultaneously and in precisely equal measure by both sides. Believing this closes off all kinds of inquiry to you, blinds you to all sorts of not-so-subtle nuances and imbalances in the system.

There’s also the problem that the things I focus on — for example, that conservatism tends to be an organic product of business interests — are things that disturb them. Journalists might be social liberals, but there are damned few of them who are ready to scrutinize the power of business or the benevolence of markets. Or the motives of entrepreneurs, even when they call themselves “political entrepreneurs.”