Message From Michael - November 10, 2008

THE THREE SCREEN ELECTION – A SPECIAL REPORT

THE POLITICAL INTERNET TRAFFIC JAM

THE ELECTION NEWS VICTOR

THE ELECTION NEWS FUTURE

AN MFM FOLLOW-UP AND TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO NOTE

PAID ADVERTISEMENT – NEWS DIRECTOR

COCKTAIL CHATTER – ONLINE MURDER


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THE THREE SCREEN ELECTION. In this special edition of Message from Michael, we’re going to sum up some of the new media and mainstream media numbers from the campaign. I know you’ve already heard about this being the year of the Internet when it comes to politics, but this is really more of what I would call the three screen election, because the out-reach and the two-way conversation between the public and the politicians did reach across the TV screen, the computer screen and the hand-held screen.

THE POLITICAL INTERNET TRAFFIC JAM. The election of Sen. Barack Obama scored the highest per minute net usage worldwide of any news event since Internet backbone firm Akamai began monitoring such usage three years ago. Nearly 8.6 Million people hit the Internet every minute starting at 11 p.m. election night. The next highest event was the elimination of the U.S. in the World Cup finals by Ghana in June of 2006 (7.2 Million). Sporting events took nine of the top 15 net usage events. Even the next day’s post-election usage scored high (# 7 in ranking) at 4,885,406 users per minute – just barely ahead of the 8th highest event – the death of Anna Nicole Smith (4,885,065). The post election day resignation of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on November 8th, 2006, came in 15th. And just in case you’re curious – the other non-sporting events that generated heavy traffic, besides Anna Nicole Smith’s death, were Cory Lidle’s plane crashing into the New York apartment building on October 11, 2006 and the deadline shootings at Virginia Tech on October 17, 2007.

Former Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi who helped start the Internet political machine says the Internet in 2008 allowed both campaigns to create the “greatest get-out-the-vote campaign in U.S. History.” Although both candidates used the Internet, Obama’s campaign is credited with meshing the social networking aspects of the Internet better. For example, according to senior analyst Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester Research, Obama had four times as many YouTube subscribers as Sen. John McCain, four times as many Facebook subscribers, four times as many MySpace subscribers and 240 times more followers on Twitter (112,474 followers compared to McCain’s 4,603). It’s also probably indicative of the youth support that the number of Facebook subscribers for Obama (2,379,102) is nearly three times the number of his MySpace subscribers (833,161). And in the same vein, and not surprisingly, in a survey by micro-blogging site Twitter, Obama out-polled McCain six to one. Interestingly, at least to me, people are still twittering on the election.twitter.com site, and for all four candidates.

And although Obama also dominated the online video (the “yes, we can” video had 10 Million views), according to website UTubeblog, it was Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin who really scored. Her first interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson scored as many viewers online as it did on TV while the Tina Fey portrayal of her actually scored more viewing on-line than it did on TV. Indicative of the Obama campaign’s multi-platform out-reach, they even placed ads in video games like Nascar 09, NHL 09, NFL Tour and Need for Speed. Not to be out-done, the McCain campaign established a campaign headquarters on the Linden Lab’s virtual world Second Life where people could hang out at the – Straight Talk Café.

THE ELECTION NEWS VICTOR. Before the pundits officially declare this the Internet election, a note of reality – three quarters of the public (72%) still cite TV as their primary source for election news, according to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. That number is more than double the number who cite the Internet (33%). BUT – and it’s a big BUT – the percentage citing the Internet either first or second in terms of campaign news has tripled from the last presidential election when only one in ten (10%) cited the Internet. The Internet has also officially over-taken newspapers as the campaign news source. In 2004, one in four (28%) cited newspapers – a number that stayed basically flat in this presidential election year (29%), while, as I noted, the Internet has climbed past newspapers with 33%. And before television people gloat, the percentage citing TV is down four points election to election (76% to 72%). Not surprisingly, the Pew study shows younger Americans cite the Internet in much greater numbers with nearly half (49%) calling it as a main source of election. That’s three times newspapers in that group (17%) and not nearly as far behind television (61%). Even less surprising, the study says the audiences for major cable news networks are highly partisan while the audiences for network TV and the Internet are more in line with the general public.

THE ELECTION NEWS FUTURE. According to an article in MediaWeek by reporter Mike Shields, the intense interest in this election may signal a shift of people becoming “online-news junkies” for good. As support for that, he notes that MSNBC.com has added more than 13 Million unique users, pushing its site to 43.2 Million total users. Citing figures from Nielsen Online, Yahoo News is up 5.7 Million uniques to 38 Million while CNN is up 6.4 Million users to 37 Million. Left-leaning political website HuffingtonPost.com saw its user base jump 457% to 7.5 Million uniques. Shields talked to several of the website chiefs who admit that while many of the newcomers are “light users” who come aboard only during special events, but they expect their numbers to still stay high. The trick is to use some of the strategies developed in the election coverage for their non-political news stories.

AN MFM FOLLOW-UP. The Federal Communications Commission has approved the use of the so-called white spaces in the broadcast spectrum (mentioned in a previous MfM headlined “Knights in White Spaces”), despite the opposition of broadcast groups. The commission also approved Verizon’s acquisition of Alltell, making it the largest wireless carrier in the U.S., and SprintNextel was given the go-ahead to buy Clearwire. That last part all sounds like just so much business news, but the significance of this is that it clears the way for the creation of Wi-Max, a substantially more robust wireless transmission system. We’ll talk about that more in a future MfM. In a previous MfM, headlined, “Hey, You, Get On To My Cloud,” we talked about the cloud computing future. Microsoft has unveiled a new Windows program called Azure which it says is a cloud computing system for the Internet, allowing developers to build applications on line in real time using existing Windows languages. Okay, you know the real reason I did this follow-up. I just had to use those headlines again.

PAID ADVERTISEMENT – NEWS DIRECTOR. Hey, cool, my first paid advertisement on the MfM newsletter… except I had to pay for it myself. Oh, well. Anyway, here it is: WNEG-TV, the television station recently acquired by the University of Georgia, is looking for a news director. The station is one of only three university-owned commercial television operations in the country. We’re looking for someone who understands the realities of small market television (and all that implies) but also understands the vision that comes with a university-owned operation (and all that implies). Our core product is news, delivered primarily by television but eventually through multiple delivery systems. The small professional staff is supplemented by university students, but will eventually include trained citizen media and user generated content. The position will initially be based in Toccoa, Georgia, but moved to Athens within a year. An unusual opportunity and challenge for the right person. Contact Michael Castengera at mcasteng@uga.edu.

TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO NOTE: Both of these items have gotten a lot of press, but I still have to mention them. Maybe we’ll talk about them more later. The Christian Science Monitor has announced that it will stop printing a weekday paper version of the century-old newspaper in April and only publish online. The paper’s editor, John Yemma, says the newspaper has the “luxury and opportunity” to do something every newspaper will have to do in five years time. And CNN has announced that it is launching a wire service in direct competition to the Associated Press and is courting major newspapers. The A.P. has been under fire recently for a rate change, with several major newspapers dropping the service.

COCKTAIL CHATTER. According to attorney Michael C. Dorf at Findlaw.com, when Barack Obama was born in 1961, twenty-one American states still banned inter-racial marriages. A little perspective on the online video phenomenon: the head of MySpace’s TV content and marketing area says two-thirds of the videos viewed are on viewer profiles. In other words, friends telling friends about stuff they’ve put on their space. One of the princesses of those online videos is Justine Ezarik who may not be someone you want to know but someone you should know about. She may be the latest online phenomenon. Her video about ordering a cheeseburger has garnered 600,000 views while her video complaining about her iPhone bill has generated 1,336,000 views (let me put that in words – more than one million, three hundred and thirty six thousand views). And, finally, a person you probably don’t want to know –a 43-year-old Japanese piano teacher has been arrested for murdering her online husband. Let me be clear. This is her avatar husband, her virtual husband in the virtual world Maple Story, NOT a ‘real’ husband. Let me also be clear. She wasn’t arrested for murder. She was actually arrested for illegally accessing a computer. But the fact remains that she became so upset with her 33-year-old office worker avatar husband that she… well, killed him after what The Times of London called “an abrupt but messy online divorce.”

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