Reddit Crashes. Blame Obama.
President Obama is/was starting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) appearance on Reddit and the service buckled under.
It’s back up though. You can follow the thread here.
Reddit, I am Barack Obama, President of the United States — AMA.
Reddit makes the news/is the news again this year.
Obama Outpaces Romney in Direct Voter Communications on Web, Social Media
At the time of analysis (June 4-17, 2012), the Obama campaign had public accounts on nine separate platforms: Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Spotify and two accounts on Twitter (@BarackObama and @Obama2012).
That is twice that of the Romney campaign, which had public accounts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Google+. Romney has since expanded his presence, adding accounts on Tumblr and Spotify.
The Obama campaign is also substantially more active in these domains. Across all the platforms studied, the Obama campaign posted nearly four times as much content as the Romney campaign-614 Obama posts compared with 168 posts for Romney.
The gap in activity was greatest on Twitter. Romney averaged one tweet a day. Obama averaged 29 tweets a day, (17 per day on @BarackObama, the Twitter Account associated with his presidency, and 12 on @Obama2012).New analysis from the Project for Excellence in Journalism: Read more
Four years ago, the fallout from a controversial remark would have taken hours, if not a full day, to unfold. In 2012, social media, which enables reporters to file in real-time and puts increased pressure on campaigns to speed up their response time, has brought the pace of the news cycle down to a matter of minutes and seconds. The ‘one-day story’ — itself an archaic term in the 21st century — has become the one-hour story.
More than ten thousand journalists are expected to attend the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in Tampa and Charlotte in the late summer of 2012. A complicated array of laws will be enforced at these events by federal officers, state and local law enforcement, and private security. This Guide is intended to provide detailed information about how the law will apply to those trying to gather news at the events surrounding the conventions.
The Citizen Media Law Project has prepared a comprehensive guide to reporting on the political conventions, as well as a handy one-sheet pocket guide for reporters. Both are free for download on their site.
Committing Acts of Journalism
Via the Huffington Post:
CNN’s Soledad O’Brien did something which is extremely rare in television news these days: she actually did her job…
…The action took place Tuesday afternoon, as O’Brien was interviewing former New Hampshire governor and George W. Bush Chief of Staff John Sununu. With the actual documents in hand, O’Brien pointed out the striking similarities between the Medicare plans of Mitt Romney and his controversial vice presidential running mate Paul Ryan, who seeks to change the government guaranteed health care program into a voucher system.
“But it’s very different,” Sununu insisted. “For example, when Obama gutted Medicare by taking $717 billion out of it, the Romney plan does not do that. The Ryan plan mimicked part of the Obama package there, the Romney plan does not. That’s a big difference.”
O’Brien essentially accused him of lying:
“I understand that this is a Republican talking point because I’ve heard it repeated over and over again. These numbers have been debunked, as you know, by the Congressional Budget Office. … I can tell you what it says. It (Obama’s Medicare plan) cuts a reduction in the expected rate of growth, which you know, not cutting budgets to the elderly. Benefits will be improved.”
At this point Sununu, clearly agitated, became nasty and indignant, angered by O’Brien’s insistence on fact over fiction:
“Soledad, stop this!” Sununu replied, raising his voice. “All you’re doing is mimicking the stuff that comes out of the White House and gets repeated on the Democratic blog boards out there.”
O’Brien continued reading from the Romney and Obama plans verbatim, and cited Factcheck.org, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office and CNN’s own independent analysis in refuting Sununu’s deceptive rhetoric.
Read through for the rest of the exchange. The video’s available as well.
“A gold mine of data will soon be available to help make our political system more transparent, thanks to the Federal Communication Commission. But this gold will be useless unless it’s extracted, shaped, and polished.”
Great How-to for mining political data out of the FCC’s new database and some ideas for what else needs to be done.
After months of discussion, the FCC has made the political files available online. The political files include information about ad buys that political campaigns have made at local TV stations. For more background on the political files, check out our previous ONA Issues posts, here, here and here.
Twitter Launches Political Index: The Twitter Pulse Of The Election
Right now, if you want to know how the country feels about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, you have to rely on pundits’ intuitions or traditional opinion polls, conducted as they always have been — by phone, over the course of hours or days. There’s no direct way to check the pulse of millions of actual people, simultaneously and directly, second by second.
Twitter is launching a tool today that it says will fill that gap, and sort through the 400 million tweets a day from 140 million active users. Twitter and real-time search engine Topsy are launching the “Twitter Political Index,” a daily assessment of how Twitter feels about Obama and Romney, in an election cycle that’s being played out moment-to-moment on the social service.
Interesting…
Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
For more than a year now, EFF has encouraged mainstream press publications like the New York Times to aggressively defend WikiLeaks’ First Amendment right to publish classified information in the public interest and denounce the ongoing grand jury investigating WikiLeaks as a threat to press freedom.
Well, we are now seeing why that is so important: at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on July 11th, some members of Congress made it clear they also want New York Times journalists charged under the Espionage Act for their recent stories on President Obama’s ‘Kill List’ and secret US cyberattacks against Iran. During the hearing, House Republicans “pressed legal experts Wednesday on whether it was possible to prosecute reporters for publishing classified information,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
In addition, the Washingtonian’s Shane Harris reported a month ago that a “senior” Justice Department official “made it clear that reporters who talked to sources about classified information were putting themselves at risk of prosecution.”
Leaks big and small have been happening for decades—even centuries—and the most recent are comparable to several others. No journalist has ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act and it has generally been accepted, even by Congress’s own research arm, that the publication of government secrets by the press is protected speech under the First Amendment. Yet the government is actively investigating WikiLeaks and now threatening others for just that.
The mainstream media may see little in common with Assange’s digital publication methods or his general demeanor, but what he is accused of is virtually indistinguishable from what other reporters and newspapers do every day: poke, prod, and cajole sources within the government to give up classified information that newspapers then publish to inform the public of the government’s activities.
FJP: All so true. Read on.
“WikiLeaks describes the data dump as having come from 680 different domain names and 678,000 individual email addresses, with more than a million recipients.”
A massive release from Wikileaks. Interesting to see how news organizations will sort through and present this data. Let us know if you see good examples.
Interesting use of Tumblr to cover the 2012 election by the Washington Post.
It’s all but certain that a handful of states will determine whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney will get to 270 electoral votes Nov. 6. And within those states, a few recurring narratives will dominate headlines and national perceptions about how those votes will swing in the fall: Economic recovery in Michigan. Immigration laws in Arizona. Union battles in Wisconsin. Northern Virginia (blue), and the rest of Virginia (not so blue).
Today we’re launching The 12, a Washington Post blog powered by Tumblr and populated by student journalists at 12 universities in competitive 2012 election states.
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