« How Should the Press Cover Campaigns? | Main | What Sticks, What Slides »

March 27, 2008

Head-slap Moment for the Times

Perhaps The New York Times is behind the times. Or perhaps it thinks its readers are. Today's head-slap moment --wow, there's information sharing going on out there!-- demonstrates something far more interesting about how people use the internet. The article begins:

Senator Barack Obama’s videotaped response to President Bush’s final State of the Union address — almost five minutes of Mr. Obama’s talking directly to the camera — elicited little attention from newspaper and television reporters in January.

But on the medium it was made for, the Internet, the video caught fire. Quickly after it was posted on YouTube, it appeared on the video-sharing site’s most popular list and Google’s most blogged list. It has been viewed more than 1.3 million times, been linked by more than 500 blogs and distributed widely on social networking sites like Facebook.

It is not news that young politically minded viewers are turning to alternative sources like YouTube, Facebook and late-night comedy shows like “The Daily Show.” But that is only the beginning of how they process information.

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

Anyone paying attention for the past 10 years knows what social networking is (or anyone who has neighbors, friends, and family). The internet simply makes social networking easier and more efficient. And, like any new medium, the internet has other effects on communication that we're only just now beginning to anticipate and understand.

But what strikes me about this article is how it misses something far more interesting about what young people (and some old ones) are passing on. We learn from the article that they like to pass on video. But of what exactly? And what does that mean?

The lead, perhaps, gives us a clue: The "unfiltered" response of Barack Obama (could be any public person speaking directly to the public on an issue of public importance). What is it about such an artifact that would elicit 1.3 million views?

I hesitate to conclude that people simply want unfiltered news (there really is no such thing, BTW). I'm thinking they might actually want something that typical news coverage isn't giving them. Now there's a story!



Posted by acline at March 27, 2008 7:24 AM | | Spotlight