Editor & Publisher

Web Changes Campaign 2004 ...
And the Reporters Who Follow It

By Joe Strupp

Dick Polman's coverage of the Sept. 4 Democratic presidential debate in Albuquerque, N.M., began when The Philadelphia Inquirer veteran attended a Howard Dean "meetup" the night before. Named for the Web site, www.meetup.com, which allows organizers to plan almost any spontaneous gathering for a variety of causes, these events have become a mainstay for Dean and nearly every other presidential candidate.

"It was a very unscripted environment," Polman says about the meeting, which took place in the back of a Santa Fe restaurant with some 200 people and Dean. "I liked the spontaneity of it. You felt like you got a much more real event."

Web Changes Campaign 2004 ...
And the Reporters Who Follow It

By Joe Strupp

NEW YORK -- It seemed like any other conference call scheduled during a presidential campaign. At precisely 1 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 12, there we were, a handful of news scribes linked via cell, cordless and handheld wireless phone connections. At the appointed hour, Joe Trippi, campaign manager for Gov. Howard Dean, welcomed us to the live phone event, ready to make his pitch.

But there was one unusual aspect to this electronic roundtable. Trippi was not there to extol his candidate's vision for health care, education, or even foreign relations. The point of this telephone togetherness was to show off the campaign's Web site and its latest organizing, fund-raising, and grassroots networking capabilities.

"All of these tools work to bring more people into the political process," Trippi told the reporters, each logged on to the Web site, as he demonstrated new features aimed at letting Dean supporters link to one another, school themselves in local organizing, and even raise money. He also bragged that more than 350,000 supporters had signed up through the online page, with 150,000 contributing money.

The Dean conference call is just one example of how the Internet has fully bloomed in political campaigns, not only as a tool for the candidates, but also as both a positive and negative reality for reporters covering the race. As the 2004 election season heats up, political reporters and editors admit they must pay much more attention to the World Wide Web.

Whether it's checking candidate Web sites almost hourly for news and activity, responding to a barrage of e-mails from campaign managers, supporters and readers, or trying to comprehend the impact of the first true online fund-raising race in presidential politics, both veteran and rookie journalists say the Web has reached major-player status on today's campaign stage.

"There is hardly an event that I cover that I am not, in some way, making use of the Web," says Dan Balz, veteran political writer for The Washington Post. John Wildermuth, senior political correspondent at the San Francisco Chronicle, agrees. "It has absolutely exploded," he says of the Internet's campaign impact. "Newspapers are having to pay a lot more attention to it."

The Internet's grip on the presidential race, as well as many state campaigns, comes at a time when newspapers are dealing with other factors that have caused them to approach the 2004 campaign differently. With less money to spend, more competition from cable news outlets, and a wider Democratic field of candidates for president (now 10) than usual, editors contend the next six to 12 months will require a changing game plan. "We're not going to do every swing with every candidate, we're mixing it up more," says Maralee Schwartz, national political editor for The Washington Post, adding that budget cutbacks are curtailing some travel plans for reporters. "We are doing more voter pieces and larger enterprise pieces."

Clearly, though, the Internet has thrown the biggest wrench into the political machinery of campaigns and political coverage as 2004 looms, according to those in the daily reporting mix. Presidential primary reporting, which used to consist of covering debates, following candidates trekking to Iowa and New Hampshire, and routinely reviewing quarterly campaign fund-raising reports, has been turned on its ear.

Now reporters, editors and political analysts need to keep an almost constant eye on the Web -- so as not to miss the latest attack e-mail, fund-raising update, or online-based supporter meeting. "I spend 30% more time on the Web than I did four years ago," says Mike Glover, an Associated Press veteran who covers Iowa. Even David Broder of The Washington Post -- the "dean" of political reporters -- calls the Internet "a central factor."

Fund raising via the Web -- which Dean has used most effectively and each campaign has followed -- sparked the first major change for reporters. Although it is easier for correspondents to keep tabs on each campaign's war chest with Web site updates, it is also harder to determine who is contributing. Campaigns are raising more money from smaller contributors whose $20 and $50 online donations often outnumber the fat-cat contributions of the past.

"If you are a candidate, you can now go to all of your supporters online, ask them to give money, and you get it all by the next day," says Ronald Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times. "In the past, that kind of request would have taken two weeks through the mail." Brownstein saw the effect of such fund raising on his coverage at the end of the second financial disclosure reporting period on June 30 -- when he had to stay online all day just to follow campaign Web sites releasing up-to-the-minute figures as the deadline drew closer. "That was the moment that the Internet arrived in the political world as a tool we have to rely upon," he said. "What they are doing online is almost more relevant than anything else."

For Jeff Zeleny of the Chicago Tribune, the Web's fund-raising relevance became clear when he was forced to cover a Dean event in July aimed at countering a South Carolina Republican fund-raiser headlined by Vice President Dick Cheney. When Dean's campaign heard that Cheney would raise $300,000 through his event, Dean challenged his supporters to contribute the same amount via the Web during the vice president's gathering. "I had to follow it online as the Dean campaign posted an update every hour," Zeleny says of the effort, which collected more than $400,000. "It was a new way to see how much they were raising."

Blackberry feeds forever

Dick Polman's coverage of the Sept. 4 Democratic presidential debate in Albuquerque, N.M., began when The Philadelphia Inquirer veteran attended a Howard Dean "meetup" the night before. Named for the Web site, www.meetup.com, which allows organizers to plan almost any spontaneous gathering for a variety of causes, these events have become a mainstay for Dean and nearly every other presidential candidate.

"It was a very unscripted environment," Polman says about the meeting, which took place in the back of a Santa Fe restaurant with some 200 people and Dean. "I liked the spontaneity of it. You felt like you got a much more real event."

During the debate, the Internet impact continued in many forms, reporters say, as writers covered the event from a nearby press room, with most keeping their laptop Web connections going. For Balz of The Washington Post, the online connection proved useful when Sen. Joe Lieberman referred to comments Dean had made in a Post story, which Balz was able to quickly confirm by checking the newspaper's archives online.

Balz also credits the Web for allowing him to get an online transcript of the second Democratic debate, held in Baltimore on Sept. 9, within 30 minutes after the event ended. "The process of distributing copies of paper does not compare to the zap of an e-mail," he declares.

The growing online campaign has forced most reporters to add the wireless Blackberry devices -- which provide expanded Web and wireless phone service -- to their reporting tool kit. "Blackberrys are essential," says Zeleney, explaining they are needed to get the minute-by-minute e-mails that have become a staple of campaign public relations. "I've had one for six months. It has almost replaced the cell phone as a way to reach a campaign."

But the growing wireless and online connections of the campaigns also have disadvantages. For some reporters, just trying to cover the debates or concentrate on work gets difficult when campaign managers continuously send messages via e-mail to promote their spin. "It's become a macho battle of the campaigns to see who can pile on the e-mail," says Adam Nagourney, who writes for The New York Times. "I get barraged."

Nagourney got so fed up with campaign e-mails that he asked two of the campaign managers to remove him from their e-mail lists during the Baltimore and Albuquerque debates. He does, however, credit the Web for making fact-checking almost instantaneous. Citing a rumor two weeks ago that Rep. Dick Gephardt was dropping out, Nagourney says he e-mailed the Gephardt campaign asking about the rumor and received an e-mail flatly denying it within minutes.

Still, the campaign e-mail mill seems to grow ever larger with each event, reporters say. Polman points to a moment in the Baltimore debate that indicates how involved the e-mail factor is in coverage. During that gabfest, Lieberman challenged Dean over his recent remark suggesting the U.S. should not take sides in the Israel-Palestine debate. Dean claimed during the debate that his position mirrored that of Bill Clinton. "Within minutes, Lieberman's campaign had a 1998 quote from Clinton in which he said he supported Israel and e-mailed it to us," Polman recalls. "This happens a lot."

Borne in a blog cabin?

Reporters aren't the only ones trying new technologies. The Telegraph in Nashua, N.H., has constructed a special online syndication tool so that interested individuals and other Web sites can easily view the newspaper's primary coverage. In 2000, a team led by nh.com Editor Ernesto Burden created a popular Web site dedicated to the race, nhprimary.com. The site is back this year, along with the latest hot tech tool: an RSS (Rich Site Summary) headline feed. Once a Web site creates an RSS feed, subscribers can get the latest headlines with links to the complete story on nhprimary.com. The feeds can be read on special software called news aggregators or on Web sites such as bloglines.com.

For Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times, Web resources have meant an end to overflowing files of campaign documents and paper records. "You don't have to be quite as religious about keeping copies of speeches and announcements," he says, citing a filing cabinet full of paperwork from the 1992 campaign that remains in his office. "Now it is all on computer and sent via e-mail."

But the Web also adds a reporting burden, says Jill Lawrence, a USA Today political writer who has had to take part in online interviews for usatoday.com following each debate. "We have to think about that all the time," she says.

Beyond the individual examples of Web-related campaign coverage, reporters and editors are realizing that the Internet's impact requires a broader scope of reporting, some elements of which remain unknown. "We are still figuring out what is out there," says Joanna Weiss, a Boston Globe reporter whose beat is still being formed as a mix of politics and technology. "The biggest challenge is getting a sense of how many people are coming to the campaign via the Internet -- the Blogosphere."

Mike Tackett, political editor of the Chicago Tribune, said the expanded Web presence is forcing him to create a new political Web beat, while others, such as John Harwood, political editor at The Wall Street Journal, concede they are requiring more coverage of Web-related factors even though "I don't feel like I have a good enough understanding of it."

Those who monitor newspaper coverage warn that reporters and editors must be careful not to go overboard on Internet-related campaign reporting, and make sure to maintain the journalistic practices that have long served them best. "You still have to check everything out," says John Hanchette, a journalism professor at St. Bonaventure University and a longtime Gannett News Service Washington, D.C. correspondent. "You have a million different bloggers and people who have a lot of free time to make things up."

Letters editors, meanwhile, have their own new issue to worry about: form letters generated by web-based campaigns that have already been successful at getting newspapers to print multiple copies of the same letter, sent via different names. "We saw a lot of it around the Bush tax-cut time," says David Beasley, Op-Ed editor of The Atlanta Journal Constitution. "We got burned a couple of times, so we are always on the lookout for it."

Although none of the letters editors who spoke with E&P had put any new procedures in place to guard against the form letters, each claims they will be more aware of the scams. "They are pretty obvious to spot," says Mary Cox, letters editor at the Los Angeles Times. "And we always make sure to call to verify." But in 2004, separating true grassroots politics from Web-based Astroturf is what much of newspaper political coverage will be all about.

Source: Editor & Publisher Online

Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is associate editor for E&P.