The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza recently profiled "Politico Live," a live election-night show that's being produced by the 5-year-old website, and which was broadcast by C-SPAN nationally during some recent GOP primary contests. Also, Ann Derry, the editorial director for video at the New York Times, discussed with me in an e-mail this week's launch of the Times' twice-weekly live politics edition of its TimesCast video news program. Derry noted, "We will be covering the conventions in live video, as well as the debates and election night. And we will produce video reports from the field and regular video enterprise reporting throughout the election season."

So in the future, newshounds will have ever more choices for watching political debates and election night results than simply the network or cable news outlets.

All this leaves me wondering: Is this the beginning of a longer and broader trend? Will online journalism begin to take on more qualities of television than of print? How long will it be before Politico begins competing with CNN and Huffington Post takes market share from MSNBC? Or am I dramatically over-thinking this? (Side note: The irony isn't lost on me that I'm commenting textually for PBS, which most people regard as a television outlet.)

From a Textual Web to a Televisual Web?

Long before MSNBC unveiled its "Lean Forward" slogan, the Internet was touted as a "lean forward medium" that, unlike the television, prompted the user to sit attentively as she read articles, clicked through to links, and commented on blog entries. In short, surfing the web was active while watching television was passive. The conventional wisdom suggested that people wouldn't have the patience to watch online video longer than three minutes or so.

As media continue to converge, that assumption is being abandoned. User behavior trends have changed and, with many people able to stream their favorite television shows on their desktop monitors, the personal computer is essentially doubling as another television.

The Internet may prove to be the petri dish where the lines between visual and verbal dissolve. As web users begin to treat the Internet as a variously "lean forward" and "lean back" medium, news outlets will be able to transcend the medium on which they traditionally appear. We've already seen this promiscuity play out in the other direction, as television channels such as Fox News, MSNBC and CNN all expand their text-based online content. While CNN is confronting the lowest ratings among the three, it launched an ad campaign boasting its large "on-air & online" audience and claiming "the largest integrated audience in media."

If, ultimately, TV channels hope to compete with print reporting online or text-based outlets hope to compete with TV channels over web video, that future may be distant. As Lizza's reporting reveals, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei over at Politico Live are really just producing "hours of unfiltered banter by Politico's motley writers who revel in how untelegenic they are." It's basically a humble reality show for political junkies that emphasizes the news-about-the-news over the actual news. And, as Derry at the New York Times pointed out to me, the Times essentially transitioned its documentary television unit into the newsroom department that produces the NYTimes.com videos. This may be why the Times videos still have as much a documentary feel to them as a newsy feel.

Steady Supply of Video

As web video continues to surge among traditional and newer news outlets alike, one wonders whether, in the future, textual content will take a backseat to televisual content. With cheapening bandwidth and constantly improving streaming technology, the technological barriers for this shift would be fairly low. And with text-based news organizations ramping up their capabilities on this front, there will be a steady supply of video. And video ads are booming as well, with eMarketer predicting that online video ads will make up 15% of all online ad revenues by 2016, up from 7.9% this year.

It will come down to whether the demand for print journalism remains strong. As Derry suggested to me, "A story can be told primarily in video: Great characters, strong visuals, lively action can be captured in moving pictures in a way that text can't hope to duplicate." This is certainly true, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the Times video programming evolves.

But aren't there also qualities of text-based journalism that video can't hope to duplicate? What do you think they are, if so? And what do you think the influence will be of video journalism on text-based online journalism going forward?

Mark Hannah is the political correspondent for MediaShift. Mark's political career began on the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign, where he worked as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently done advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign, the Presidential Inaugural Committee and the White House. In the "off-season" (i.e., in between campaigns) he worked in the PR agency world and conducted sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He serves on the board of directors of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and was a research fellow at the Society for New Communications Research. He is a graduate of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and received a master's degree from Columbia University. His personal website is www.mark-hannah.com, and he can be reached at markphannah[at]gmail.com. Follow Mark on Twitter: @MarksTerritory

To people who believed that moneyed interests already had an outsized influence on the electoral process, the decision was chilling. The ruling provided only one consolation for them: that this new battle royal environment is predicated on real transparency over who's paying for the punches. Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his tie-breaking decision in favor of unbridled corporate speech, suggested that the Internet is the medium that allows this type of real-time transparency. He wrote:

With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters ... The First Amendment protects political speech; and disclosure permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way.

In this newly unregulated free market of political ideas, neither the ideas' manufacturers (i.e., the Super PACs) nor their merchants (i.e., the local TV stations) are eager to reveal the price tag to the customer (i.e., the electorate). In other words, while campaign law requires certain types of reporting, the "prompt disclosure" online about PAC advertising spends that Justice Kennedy had imagined has not become a reality.

This is where ProPublica, the public interest journalism organization, comes in. According to ProPublica, in a world of instantaneous communication technology where public opinion is rapidly informed and influenced, reporters can't sit around and wait for the Federal Election Committee to publish its monthly campaign-finance reports. So what's a reporter to do? Every citizen has the right to show up at a television station and inspect the "public files" that contain its most current political advertising data, but even the most resourceful investigative reporter can't be reasonably expected to track all this information down herself.

ProPublica's PAC Track Campaign

ProPublica became interested in this dilemma after listening to a radio segment from "On The Media" in which former Federal Communications Commission adviser Steven Waldman expressed frustration that the broadcast industry won't voluntarily publish political advertising data online.

Daniel Victor, a social media editor at ProPublica, decided that "if TV stations won't post their data on political ads, we will." Victor and his team have employed a crowdsourcing model and are asking citizens (including local reporters) from across the country to volunteer to gather this data from their local TV stations so that ProPublica can aggregate it and share it in precisely the way Justice Kennedy had envisioned. They're encouraging participation using a Google Docs sign-up form (here), a platform that hints at how simple it would be for local TV stations to publish this data. And they're using the New York Times Campaign Finance API to help visualize this information in a way that makes it easily digestible.

Victor told me, "In this case, crowdsourcing is not merely the easiest way to get the data -- it's the only way. We believe this can perform as a check on the spending that's reported -- one intrepid person discovered $70 million in unreported spending over 10 years in Michigan by visiting stations."

Of course, the crowdsourcing model will only be successful if a critical mass of civic-minded volunteers sign up. Victor acknowledges this and said, "We need contributors in as many markets as possible. We won't know how many states we'll work on during the general election until we know how many people are interested in participating. So I'd ask them to blog, tweet, email or shout to let others know about the project."

Why the Resistance?

If television stations are required to keep a continuously updated file that accounts for all the Super PAC and campaign advertising revenue they receive, and make that file available to any member of the public upon in-person request, why not simply keep and update that file on a publicly visible online portal? The FCC proposed such a rule change late last year.

Waldman recently wrote in The Columbia Journalism Review that the broadcast industry contends "that it would dramatically increase the burden on local stations, since some of the files are updated frequently during campaign season." In his op-ed, which contains links to the FCC proposal and industry response, Waldman observes that "the rest of the world has figured out ways to use the Internet to reduce workload and cost. I'm not sure the broadcasters want to take the position that they will be the one industry that can't possibly be expected to use the Internet to improve efficiency."

Waldman speculates that TV broadcasters may be protecting the hand that feeds them. After all, political advertising is expected to bring them $2.5 billion this year (nearly four times the revenue from just 10 years ago). And Waldman points to a New York Times article by Brian Stelter that uncovers a flurry of merger and acquisition activity in the TV industry that is driven by the new-found fortunes of political ads.

If ProPublica has its way, we may achieve the type of transparency that Kennedy envisioned in the ruling that gave birth to Super PAC advertising. What's more, news coverage by local stations may be more easily scrutinized to ensure, in real time, that no inappropriate correlations exist between the amount of advertising dollars they received and the tone of the political coverage.

Super PACs are a new reality of the media landscape for better or worse. They exist only to serve a specific candidate or a narrow cause. So it's the television stations that serve -- at least in theory -- a more public interest, that are being held accountable for the advertising they broadcast across the public airwaves.

ProPublica thinks this accountability could take the form of publishing political advertising data, which they're required to do anyway, regularly online. While ProPublica seeks a form of "transparancy-in-advertising," The Annenberg Public Policy Center's Flackcheck.org campaign recently called for "truth-in-advertising" when it launched a "Stand By Your Ad" campaign seeking to hold local TV stations accountable for the accuracy of Super PAC ads. That campaign points out that, while local TV stations "are required to air political ads by candidates for such federal offices as the presidency even if their content is blatantly deceptive ... [they] have the right to bar so-called 'third party' ads or insist on the accuracy of those they decide to air."

As the campaign season heats up, it will be interesting to see whether some socially responsible television stations will, when it comes to super PAC ad spending, prioritize the public interest over the profit motive. And whether transparency and accuracy are publicly compelled, as the Citizens United ruling had hoped.

Mark Hannah is the political correspondent for MediaShift. Mark's political career began on the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign, where he worked as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently done advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign, the Presidential Inaugural Committee and the White House. In the "off-season" (i.e., in between campaigns) he worked in the PR agency world and conducted sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He serves on the board of directors of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and was a research fellow at the Society for New Communications Research. He is a graduate of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and received a master's degree from Columbia University. His personal website is www.mark-hannah.com, and he can be reached at markphannah[at]gmail.com. Follow Mark on Twitter: @MarksTerritory

As a teenager who was vocally opinionated about political issues, I often heard the cautionary refrain "Politics is not the topic of polite conversation." That counsel must have been lost on me, since I find myself as an adult publicly airing my opinions as both the political correspondent for this blog and as a Democratic analyst periodically appearing on FoxNews.com. I understand the wisdom of that advice, however, and know that conversations about politics (like those about religion) often begin as well-intentioned contests of ideas but end as emotionally charged and intractable disputes.

A new study released today from the Pew Internet and American Life Project illustrates this point. It found that 18 percent of people who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Google+ have blocked, unfriended or hidden someone because of that person's disagreeable political postings.

Aversion or the end of meaningful conversation?

To determine whether this is simply a case of the online public steering clear of, um, impolite conversation or is broader evidence of political opinions abruptly ending meaningful relationships, one must dig a bit deeper into the data. Among the people who've responded to unwanted political posts by giving an online cold shoulder, nearly 70% have done so to a distant friend or acquaintance. We all have a few of those Facebook friends with whom, after briefly meeting at a conference or dinner party, we perfunctorily became "friends." It wouldn't be a surprise that a disagreeable (or even distasteful) political comment on Facebook might serve as an excuse to shed some of these "friends" that we marginally knew to begin with.

What is surprising is the fact that nearly one-third of the people who have blocked, unfriended or hid someone in response to political posts did so to a "close personal friend," and nearly one-fifth of them did so to a "member of their family." Considering the old saying that someone with staunchly held political beliefs has "drunk the Kool-Aid," can it really be the case that, online, Kool-Aid is thicker than water? Are we really shunning close friends and family members because of differences of political opinion?

Perhaps. As the Pew report indicates, "Social networking sites have become places where political conversation, debate, and proselytizing occur, especially during campaign seasons ... Some analysts have expressed concerns about the impact of social networking sites on the broad political culture. They have worried that ... users might customize their friendship networks by hanging out only with people who share and reinforce their political views."

Should We Leave Networking at Social?

Perhaps social networking sites are best left to, well, social networking -- and the political debating should occur elsewhere. This is the approach that nearly a quarter of users of social networking sites take. According to the Pew report, 22 percent of those who use these sites "have decided not to post political comments or links to political material because they were worried it might upset or offend someone." In other words, these folks agree with the advice I grew up with regarding politics and polite conversations.

But for so many of us who are civic-minded and politically engaged, it would be hard to steer clear of political discussion online simply for propriety's sake. On a recent appearance on FoxNews.com, I debated against the claim that there was somehow a double standard in the media's portrayal of the outrage surrounding Rush Limbaugh's recent controversial remarks (and that there was equivalence between them and similarly offensive remarks made by comedian Bill Maher).

After I posted the link to the segment on my Facebook profile, a close family friend who's been like a grandfather to me throughout my life, and who I know to have a more conservative political outlook than myself, shared a link that criticized Maher and reiterated the claim that a double standard was at play.

My first reaction when seeing G-Pop's message on my Facebook wall was appreciation for Facebook's ability to keep me in touch with someone who's been so important to me throughout my life. My second reaction, which I recommend to anyone struggling with political differences among friends and family on their online social networks, was to agree to disagree.

Mark Hannah is the political correspondent for MediaShift. Mark's political career began on the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign, where he worked as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently done advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign, the Presidential Inaugural Committee and the White House. In the "off-season" (i.e., in between campaigns) he worked in the PR agency world and conducted sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He serves on the board of directors of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and was a research fellow at the Society for New Communications Research. He is a graduate of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and received a master's degree from Columbia University. His personal website is www.mark-hannah.com, and he can be reached at markphannah[at]gmail.com. Follow Mark on Twitter: @MarksTerritory

Social Media content on PBS MediaShift is sponsored by SocialFlow, which scores your content and optimizes publishing on Twitter and Facebook. Learn more at SocialFlow.com.

Fortunately, at least two websites have emerged in this election cycle that hope to narrow the information gap and help voters decide on a candidate by surveying them on a host of questions and then matching them with the candidate whose policy positions accord most closely with their own.

Closing the Political Information Gap

If you're like me, you've often walked into a polling booth on Election Day ready to pull the lever or push the button for the person running for president (or governor or senator), and then been confronted with dozens of names of candidates you never heard of for positions you didn't know existed ("Tree Warden"? really?). What most of us do, in that case, is simply vote for whichever name shares our party affiliation and cross our fingers that they're the right guy or gal for the job.

Historian Rick Shenkman recently chronicled some examples of voter ignorance in his provocatively titled book "Just How Stupid Are We?" (like the fact that most Americans can't name their own member of Congress). And economist Bryan Caplan argued in "The Myth of the Rational Voter" that most of us vote under the influence of faulty beliefs.

ElectNext and iSideWith.com have set out to correct that.

ElectNext, started by Keya Dannenbaum and Paul Jungwirth, describes its mission this way: "Imagine if you could cast an informed vote in every one of your elections, all the way down your ballot. Rather than relying on party or guesswork, you could choose candidates based on knowledge." Taylor Peck, who started iSideWith.com with his good friend Nick Boutelier, expresses frustration with the media's tendency to focus on the "fight of the day between the top two candidates," which eclipses substantive reporting on policy positions and leaves an "information gap between voters and candidates."

Closing that gap is exactly what both ElectNext and iSideWith seek to do. iSideWith is piloting its site with the presidential election, but it plans to expand its scope with key congressional and mayoral races in the coming weeks. ElectNext is currently live with elections for president and both houses of Congress, and remains ambitiously committed to its overarching goal of "creating a world in which every voter in every election is using ElectNext to easily vote his or her values all the way down the ballot."

Political Matchmaking Demystified

When discussing how ElectNext matches voters with candidates, Dannenbaum pulled back the curtain for me. First, there's a matching algorithm that calculates one's closeness to a candidate based on the similarity of answers and the rank of importance that a person ascribes to each question (much like the way dating websites function). Then, there's a dynamic survey algorithm that generates new questions based on your answers. This is how many computer-based standardized tests work. Finally, it has a "candidate profiling algorithm" using a political interest alliance graph that pulls data from the Federal Election Commission, special interest group ratings, and correlations among survey responses in its own database.

While ElectNext uses sophisticated algorithms from diverse datasets (indeed, it's in the process of hiring a "chief data scientist") that may help it bring its site to scale, iSideWith takes a simpler and more straightforward approach. Peck and Boutelier conduct the editorial research on their own, evaluate the candidates' positions by the "official statements" that they or their campaign make, and personally comb through every debate transcript.

Putting Policy Alignment Before Party Affiliation

The guys at iSideWith also take pains to include little-known candidates from obscure political parties. (Don't be surprised if the presidential candidate with whom you most closely align is Jimmy McMillan of the "Rent Is Too Damn High" party.) Peck complains that "the media has shut out third-party candidates in this election cycle. In South Carolina, Buddy Roemer was tied with Rick Perry in several polls but was never invited to the debates." They hope that their users who get matched with lesser-known candidates might take a moment and research them.

And why not? After all, one of the key reasons people rely so strongly on political parties is because they're helpful proxies for inferring where an otherwise unknown candidate stands. But sites like ElectNext and iSidewith promise to enable voters to learn where each (and every) candidate stands ... and which stand with them. These sites may not eliminate the power or usefulness of political parties completely, but they do hope to replace it with a more precise and informative shortcut for voter decision-making. As ElectNext's Dannenbaum told me, "Why pull a party lever on election day when you can just as easily pull a customized issues lever? That is what we're building for you."

Asked whether these algorithms might, in an effort to restore rationality to our voting, discount important character traits that aren't easily quantified, Dannenbaum said, "We couldn't agree more that there is more to choosing a candidate than pure issue alignment. It is absolutely the case that qualities like leadership, experience, charisma, and other social/intangibles enter into the calculation. In our ultimate vision of ElectNext, those intangibles will also be part of our matching." At that point, Americans will have to be able to look at a survey in front of them and answer honestly, as they do on OkCupid and Match.com: "What's your type?"

Mark Hannah is the political correspondent for MediaShift. Mark's political career began on the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign, where he worked as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently done advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign, the Presidential Inaugural Committee and the White House. In the "off-season" (i.e., in between campaigns) he worked in the PR agency world and conducted sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He serves on the board of directors of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and was a research fellow at the Society for New Communications Research. He is a graduate of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and received a master's degree from Columbia University. His personal website is www.mark-hannah.com, and he can be reached at markphannah[at]gmail.com. Follow Mark on Twitter: @MarksTerritory

A new report out from the The Pew Research Center for The People and The Press contains some interesting findings about the media outlets citizens are using to inform themselves about the presidential campaign.

Here are a few of the more surprising findings.

New Media: Not So Much

According to the study, while this is the first campaign in which the Internet has surpassed local newspapers as a primary source of political news, social-networking sites are largely exempt from this trend.

Very few Americans regularly get campaign news from social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter (6% and 2%, respectively). Even among people who report using these social networks, nearly half (46%) say they "never" learn about the election there. At first, these findings seem to fly in the face of the current craze around word-of-mouth or peer-to-peer campaign tactics. But when you consider the apparent influence of offline social networks (you know, friends and family and other relationships that transcend cyberspace), these types of grassroots approaches are doubtless effective.

Cable rules

The study also shows that for the first time, more Americans regularly get campaign news from cable news outlets like Fox News and MSNBC than from their local television stations. This makes cable news the most popular destination for regular political news. Given the frequency and intensity of these channels' political coverage, this may not be surprising. It may also not be surprising to learn that Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to tune into Fox News and Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to turn to CNN and MSNBC.

What does this all mean for the prospect of continued polarization in this country? What do we get when the increasing influence of cable news channels on the national debate mixes with the increasing partisanship of those channels' audiences -- and when more people are getting campaign news from the Internet (where, presumably, they can pick political news sites that align with their political disposition) than the local paper, magazine or radio station?

Moreover, what does it mean when the audience group that most commonly reported that they "enjoy political news a lot" (people who agree with the Tea Party) are also most likely (at 74%) to report that they see the news media as biased?

I spoke with Carroll Doherty, the associate director of the Pew Research Center for The People and The Press, who observed that Tea Party Republicans who reported seeing bias aren't thinking about Fox News, but about other media channels they're less likely to watch. My psychologist friends might chalk this up to a classic case of actor-observer bias, but no matter.

What? Mitt Romney is a Governor?

If it is the media's job, collectively, to educate voters about the candidates, their policies and issues, they're not doing a very good job of it. The report finds that the "general public's knowledge about some of the fundamentals of the major candidates' resumes, positions and the campaign process is rather limited ... 58% were able to identify Newt Gingrich as the candidate who had been speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Fewer than half (46%) knew that Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, and just 37% could identify Ron Paul as the Republican candidate opposed to U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan."

This begs the question: If the various media aren't effectively educating the voters, perhaps we can find ways of educating ourselves -- and maybe we could start by using Twitter and Facebook?

Mark Hannah is the political contributor for MediaShift. Mark's political career began on the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign, where he worked as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently done advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign, the Presidential Inaugural Committee and the White House. In the "off-season" (i.e., in between campaigns) he worked in the PR agency world and conducted sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He serves on the board of directors of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and was a research fellow at the Society for New Communications Research. He is a graduate of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and received a master's degree from Columbia University. His personal website is www.mark-hannah.com, and he can be reached at markphannah[at]gmail.com. Follow Mark on Twitter: @MarksTerritory

Here are two stories of such women, both 26 years old, who jettisoned their office jobs to create online media outlets designed for young women like them. For these women and others like them, the decision to embark upon these web-based ventures was not revolutionary. To them, the "digital media revolution" has receded and they're simply operating in the only media environment they've ever known.

The Daily Muse: Work, Inspired

Kathryn Minshew hadn't been interested in starting a website for young professional women. As an undergraduate at Duke, she had no particular predilection for women's issues, and she didn't belong to any women's groups. So when, last month, Forbes featured Kathryn in its "30 Under 30" article for her leadership of The Daily Muse, the wildly successful career- and lifestyle-focused online magazine, it was an accolade that was unforeseen by her former self.

Kathryn, who's moved her publication (and herself) out to San Francisco to participate in an incubator program, recently told me that her passion for female-oriented career advice developed gradually. "I was surprised when I applied to a position at [management consulting firm] McKinsey, and they had a separate information session for women." After she landed the job, however, she began to observe the complex gender politics amid the corporate environment. She noticed how uncomfortable women were when asking for salary increases, foregoing a bonus check for $10,000 herself simply because it didn't occur to her to ask for it.

She scoured the web for sites that offered professional guidance to young women like her, but her search was fruitless. So she partnered with friends Alex Cavoulacos and Melissa McCreery to create their own. Today, The Daily Muse has a formidable readership, with a staff of five and more than 140 writers contributing content nationwide. The site's articles are syndicated on Forbes and the Huffington Post, and Kathryn's modest ambition of targeting an otherwise underserved demographic has been regarded in media circles as prescient. She herself explains that investors are "shocked to learn that there are no other sites" that are designed and deployed for professional women.

"Kathryn saw a need and filled it," said Rachel Sklar, media entrepreneur and adviser to The Daily Muse. "She recognized that not only was there a huge market of young professional women being pumped out of colleges every year -- but that there was key information that they weren't getting. Fixing those information asymmetries is extremely powerful -- and damn good business. And it's their niche, because they made it."

Big Girls, Small Kitchen: A Guide for Quarter-Life Cooking

Phoebe Lapine was bored by her first office job after graduating from Brown. She remembers sitting down at a Thanksgiving dinner when her cousin interrupted her workaday complaints by asking her, point-blank, what she'd rather be doing. She thought about it a moment and then replied, "writing a cookbook."

Knowing, instinctively, that the boundaries between media were becoming increasingly porous, Phoebe called Cara Eisenpress, a cooking friend of hers since high school and, together, they started a cooking blog. They knew that they wanted to focus on young women who, like them, were facing the challenges of limited resources. So they came up with the title, Big Girls, Small Kitchen as an online "guide to quarter-life cooking."

According to Phoebe, they "started off slow, meeting at coffee shops after work or sneaking out to plan recipes on [their] lunch breaks." They didn't get a lot of traffic but were seen by the right people. Before long, a literary agent who had taken notice of the site approached them, and they had their deal for a cookbook. "In the Small Kitchen" was published in May and is currently available on Amazon.

While Phoebe had pretty swiftly accomplished her goal to write the cookbook, she and Cara decided to reinvest a significant portion of their advance into the website, transforming it to a more thorough resource for the community of young chefs that had begun to follow them. Phoebe recounted her literary agent's advice: "A book is something that goes on the shelf. It could be hidden discontinued, and you have much less control. It's more static. The site is something you have more control over. It lives on beyond the book and gives a rich opportunity for interaction with your audience."

What she didn't expect, however, is that the development of a more polished and attractive site actually decreased the amount of user-generated comments and contributions. She and Cara speculate that it may have been difficult for her audience, which was used to a shabby-chic site, to be greeted by something that had a more professional design. Cara observed, "When we did our first redesign, we were so sick of having an ugly old blog that we over-corrected and wound up with a homepage that was beautiful but static, even boring. It took a few months, but we were just able to go into another design phase and play with the elements until they felt vibrant."

Now, as they embark on their new venture, Small Kitchen College, they're applying their learned lessons to create community for the culinarily curious college student. With nearly 40 student contributors, they are harnessing the collective contributions of people with shared interests, much in the way The Daily Muse has done.

These are just two examples of young media-minded entrepreneurs who are noticing barren spots in the media landscape. They understand that people with similar interests to their own are being underserved by the the current catalog of media offerings, and so they're deciding to insert their own voices into this otherwise vacuous lull. As more and more digital natives come of age and instinctively exploit online opportunities in the way that Kathryn and Phoebe have done, the digital media landscape will become more verdant and variegated for it.

Mark Hannah is the political contributor for Mediashift. Mark's political career began on the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign, where he worked as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently done advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign, the Presidential Inaugural Committee and the White House. In the "off-season" (i.e., in between campaigns) he worked in the PR agency world and conducted sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He serves on the board of directors of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and was a research fellow at the Society for New Communications Research. He is a graduate of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and received a master's degree from Columbia University. His personal website is www.mark-hannah.com, and he can be reached at markphannah[at]gmail.com

Business content on MediaShift is sponsored by the weekend MA in Public Communication at American University. Designed for working professionals, the program is suited to career changers and public relations or social marketing professionals seeking career advancement. Learn more here.

Trish Ginter is an independent fashion designer who believes in the beauty of handmade garments. In 1994, she co-founded a small boutique, Frock, in Chester, Conn. Like other artists and designers who shun modern technologies in the production of their work, Ginter thought she had little use for the online world. She considered the Internet a "nuisance," and didn't even own a cell phone until a few years ago.

Ginter did buy an iPod, however. One day, while downloading music, she had an epiphany. She thought, "If I can create a marketplace for independent fashion designers like Apple has done for musicians, that could be pretty useful." Shortly thereafter, in February of 2007, she launched SmashingDarling.com to do just that.

Today, SmashingDarling features the garments of more than 750 independent fashion designers, who upload their designs themselves. It's like Etsy if Etsy was dedicated only to independent fashion designers. Ginter and her business partner at Frock manage the site and get an 18 percent commission on all sales. And, of course, they sell their own inventory.

"I've come a long way," she said. "I now have developers on the West Coast and content providers and I've even learned a little HTML coding myself."

Making the Niche Mainstream

Much has been made about how the Internet, by allowing users to customize both the production and consumption of content, has a tendency to create niches. Chris Anderson's well known Long Tail theory posits that the unique traits of e-commerce -- fewer distribution challenges, endless catalogue space, etc. -- are shifting the economy away from a relatively small number of mainstream products and markets to more niche products.

While this is certainly occurring in the art and design world (and SmashingDarling is an example), a less discussed phenomenon is how e-commerce sites in this market may have the effect of transforming otherwise niche offerings into mainstream purchases. At least that's the hope of Jen Bekman, who started 20×200.com, a site that sells limited edition original artwork by both emerging and established artists.*

Bekman knows that the majority of Americans aren't currently in the market for fine art.

"The real world experience of buying art right now is pretty abysmal and appeals to a very small part of the population," said Bekman, who owns a gallery in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City. "When you walk into a gallery, the ability to educate yourself is very limited ... Something is $2,000 because the dealer says it's two thousand dollars. It's a very high-risk purchase ... People have misgivings and ambivalence to art buying."

Bekman attempts to mitigate this online by explaining the story of the artist, offering descriptions of the work, and offering prints at a reasonable price point. She calls the many $20 prints on her site the "gateway drug to the art world."

While the online model may not necessarily make art-buying addicts of us all, it certainly removes the obstacles -- psychological as well as financial and geographical -- that otherwise prevent fine art from being a mainstream purchase.

Getting Out There

Ginter shares this mission, and hopes to use the web to create more of a mass market for independent fashion design. When I asked her about her goals for her site, she said, "We want independent designers to be out there everywhere. All of us need to be out there increasing the size of the market. For me, when I get purchases online, they're always from a different place -- California or Texas or Colorado."

For her business expansion, Ginter credits the web's ability to introduce her brand to -- and allow dialogues with -- customers she's never met. She increasingly gets customers from people Googling "indy fashion" or "independent fashion," which she said suggests that SmashingDarling is serving a growing demand. Ginter hopes to fan the flames of that market growth on the supply side.

So, will the Internet, which has supplanted mainstream journalistic and commercial activity with more niche products and processes, have the effect of elevating niche products in the arts and design marketplace to mainstream standing? Only time will tell.

For now, neither Ginter nor Bekman say these new platforms will make in-person transactions obsolete, or disrupt their boutique or gallery. As opposed to books or CDs, where the big box stores that upended smaller retailers were themselves upended by online retailers (think of Amazon hurting Borders) or iTunes replacing Tower Records), Ginter and Bekman insist people will continue to purchase artwork or fashion designs at physical stores.

Photo of Jen Bekman courtesy of Paul Costello

*Correction: This post originally stated that artwork sold by 20×200.com is signed by the artist. In fact, each work comes with a certificate of authenticity, which is signed by the artist. This post also incorrectly referred to Jen Beckman, rather than the correct Jen Bekman.

Mark Hannah is the director of academic communications at Parsons The New School for Design. Coming out of the public relations world, he has conducted sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. Mark worked for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently worked as an advance associate for the Obama-Biden campaign and Presidential Inaugural Committee. He serves on the board of directors of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and was a 2008 research fellow at the Society for New Communications Research. He holds a BA from the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania and an master's degree from Columbia University. He can be reached at markphannah[at]gmail.com

Business content on MediaShift is sponsored by the weekend MA in Public Communication at American University. Designed for working professionals, the program is suited to career changers and public relations or social marketing professionals seeking career advancement. Learn more here.

In the two years since that post, I continued to contemplate the use of Internet activism to prompt transparency. I've been pleased to read accounts of "hacktivists" who organize democratic protests and expose unethical corporate practices. And I was proud when Parsons The New School for Design, my employer, recently co-hosted the annual "Random Hacks of Kindness event with the United Nations' Global Pulse Initiative. But when I hear Julian Assange defend the actions WikiLeaks under the banner of transparency, I cringe. Surely diplomatic confidentiality and state secrets fall under the exempted "practical limits" I mention above?

Not so, said Andy Bichlbaum, co-founder of the Yes Men and a supporter of WikiLeaks. The Yes Men is among the more famous organizations to use hoaxes and online media to target corporate wrongdoing, and Bichlbaum happens to be a colleague of mine at Parsons. I recently had the opportunity to sit with him over lunch and discuss the effectiveness and ethics of Internet activism as it relates to his own work and that of Julian Assange.

Mischief, Meddling and Digital Trickery

On the online front, they've also set up phony websites for the World Trade Organization, which got them invited to speak at a not-so-phony conference as ostensible representatives for the WTO. The Yes Men have relied on the Internet for its high jinks (and highjacks), but Bichlbaum is bearish about the Internet's potential for promoting activism.

"I think where new media become valuable is when they can get people into the streets," he said. "People can be influenced by what they read on the Internet but most take it with a grain of salt. People make decisions based on what they feel, but when I'm browsing I don't feel that much."

He also dismissed the prospects of the Internet to give new journalistic voices, citing the Atlantic cover story from last summer, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" He said online media have "demeaned the whole news profession."

WiiLeaks and Democracy

When I asked Bichlbaum about the work Assange is doing, he lit up and replied with a single word: "Awesome."

"Finally, the manifestation of the promise of the Internet: To bring about more democracy," he said. "Now there's a really high chance that anything you do could be exposed, so the solution for governments then is to be forthright in their dealings. Hacking at its best is about transparency -- making sure powerful people can't hide what they do in our name, or how they do it."

I asked Bichlbaum about the criticism that Assange conducts his work secretively, but in the name of transparency. That he seeks to declassify documents, but does so in a classified way. Isn't this hypocritical?

The underdog certainly benefits from the level playing field provided by the Internet. But the question remains as to whether this new-found firepower will be wielded for restorative or corrosive purposes. Whether transparency is being invoked in the "whole truth and nothing but the truth" sense, or the more vapid voyeuristic sense.

This all comes down to intent. And here I think Leslie Gelb's analysis in the Daily Beast is telling. If Assange really is doing what he's doing in order to make government more accountable, then why did he "toss in those cables about Italy's leader being a rake and Germany's chancellor being a cautious fuddy-duddy, and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan being 'paranoid' ... instead of leaking critical conversations with Chinese or Arab leaders to help solve the problems in Korea and Iran?" Gelb concludes, "These leaks were absolutely gratuitous and served only the purpose of making him a media marvel."

This assertion was given weight by the fantastic and illuminating New York Times Magazine cover story by the newspaper's executive editor, Bill Keller. He recounts his newspaper's interactions with WikiLeaks and Assange. In one telling excerpt, Keller describes a phone conversation he had with Assange:

He was angry that we declined to link our online coverage of the War Logs to the WikiLeaks Web site, a decision we made because we feared -- rightly, as it turned out -- that its trove would contain the names of low-level informants and make them Taliban targets. "Where's the respect?" he demanded. "Where's the respect?"

So at a time when the New York Times is taking seriously its responsibility to both the public interest (and curiosity) and its journalistic ideals, Assange is begging for respect. While the Times is responsibly confronting a new journalistic reality created by the anonymous and almost anarchical nature online media, Assange is vainly and pettily seeking linkbacks and increased pageviews. And while the changing nature of the Internet has made something like WikiLeaks an inevitability, Assange is touting himself as a "puppet master." His bravado won't hide he fact that, in the big picture, he may be as incidental as he is consequential.

There's a big difference between righteous transparency and self-righteous transparency. My friend Bichlbaum and the Yes Men are happy to make a spectacle of themselves in order to bring public attention to corporate exploitation and malfeasance. Assange seems to be breaching diplomatically sensitive cables mostly in order to make a spectacle of himself. That distinction, I think, is fairly transparent.

Mark Hannah is the director of academic communications at Parsons The New School for Design. Coming out of the public relations world, he has conducted sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. Mark worked for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently worked as an advance associate for the Obama-Biden campaign and Presidential Inaugural Committee. He serves on the board of directors of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and was a 2008 research fellow at the Society for New Communications Research. He holds a BA from the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania and an master's degree from Columbia University. He can be reached at markphannah[at]gmail.com

The impact of the gathering was considerable, and it garnered the usual attention from the mainstream media. But this year CGI also made a concerted effort to invite bloggers to its proceedings. As one of the nearly 100 bloggers in attendance, I had a unique vantage point. While others have chronicled the impressive work conducted by the annual meeting, I'd like to detail how meetings like this are evolving thanks to the digital media revolution.

Obviously, one thing to acknowledge is that blogs and social media weren't the primary driver in helping CGI raise the nearly $10 billion in donations. President Clinton's golden Rolodex represents a network that's perhaps more powerful than any indexed on LinkedIn. No advocacy website has yet matched CGI's ability to marshal human resources for positive social change. And it's not as though this gathering could have been organized on MeetUp or replicated virtually using video-teleconferencing software.

Making the Exclusive More Inclusive

That said, there is an increasingly significant online component to elite conferences such as CGI's annual meeting. After all, this exclusive gathering of the most powerful people in the world is a bit less exclusive now that anyone can watch the complete proceedings via webcast. More importantly, and more in the spirit of commission than omission, is the fact that people are now able to involve themselves with CGI via the Internet.

Members of the public asked questions of panelists via YouTube, and others undertook local philanthropic projects in the name of CGI. As a result of these initiatives, CGI's brand becomes more accessible to ordinary activists around the world, and the annual meeting is endowed with a vibrant online afterlife. President Clinton may have said it best in the conference's closing session:

There are thousands of people who have been watching this webcast online. They've followed the proceedings on Facebook and Twitter...We know that people from more than 170 countries have visited the CGI website this week to follow some part of this proceeding. We streamed the breakout sessions and plenary sessions live and more than 30,000 people tuned into them...Through the postings [bloggers] made, we reached millions of more people around the world. Nasim Fakrat was here from Afghanistan. He was the first blogger ever from that country. And I'm grateful to him and all the other bloggers for bringing proceedings here to there, wherever there is.

Other Conferences Embracing The Web

But bringing offline conference activities online isn't unique to CGI. The TED conferences started as super-exclusive, invitation-only events "where the world's leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration." Conference organizers have continued with this exclusive model but, alongside it, they've introduced another highly inclusive model.

After realizing the Internet gives them a way to animate their slogan ("ideas worth sharing"), organizers have packaged video footage of some of the most compelling presentations and made them freely available to anyone with access to the web. In doing so, they've not only opened the gates to their proverbial walled garden, but they've publicized and popularized the TED brand to the point that the conferences, paradoxically, may be seen as even more exclusive than they were before. Prestigious universities like Yale University (disclosure: Yale is former client of mine) and MIT have taken similar steps with some of their courses.

The TED conferences are ahead of the curve in their deployment of video assets. As an example, the webcasts located on the CGI website are not quite as viewer-friendly as they could be. But President Clinton and his organization have a forward-looking regard for the role the Internet can play in extending their activities to a broader set of stakeholders and supporters. And by bringing their proceedings to the Internet, they're acknowledging that the charitable endeavors of even the most powerful men and women in the world can stand to gain from the inclusion of the online masses.

Mark Hannah has spent the past several years conducting sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He specializes in issues and reputation management online. Before joining the PR agency world (v-Fluence Interactive and Edelman), Mark worked for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently conducted advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign. He is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and a fellow at the Society for New Communications Research, and he serves as an awards judge for both organizations. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he's currently pursuing a master's in strategic communications at Columbia University. He is an independent communications consultant based in New York City and the public relations correspondent for MediaShift. You can reach him at markphannah[at]gmail[dot]com.

"As long as media literacy education was about television, it was perceived to be fluff," she said. "But when the Internet came along, kids didn't know how to cite sources online, and they were creating publicly visible content in their own homes without their parents' knowledge...which sparked serious safety concerns."

If Thoman and her colleagues' work over the past half century can be credited with establishing media literacy as an academic subject, it's possible that the digital media revolution will catalyze this subject's introduction into the mainstream curriculum.

That reality seemed closer when, in May, my former boss Sen. John Kerry, along with Senators Rockefeller and Snowe, introduced the "21st Century Skills Incentive Fund Act" into the Senate. The bill recognizes that, in order to prepare students for the modern workforce, education must go beyond core curricula and teach "critical thinking and problem solving skills, communication skills, creativity and innovation skills, collaboration skills, contextual learning skills, and information and media literacy skills."

If this bill becomes law, the Department of Education will award matching grants totaling $100 million per fiscal year to states that wish to participate.

Not surprisingly, the bill received a positive reaction from the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), an organization that held its biennial conference earlier this month in Detroit. I attended the conference, and it occurred to me that media literacy is an important topic for MediaShift's audience. (See previous MediaShift coverage of media literacy here.)

The State of Information and Media Literacy

Before going any further, it's important to define "media literacy." One of the most frequently cited definitions came out of the 1992 Aspen Media Literacy Leadership Institute: "[educating students to possess] the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in a variety of forms." This sounds straightforward enough. However, the discipline has had a rocky time since its inception in the 1960s (a useful timeline of media literacy thought leadership can be found here). I think there are two reasons for this.

First, the subject lacks the perception of urgency. How can we expect children to read between the lines if many of them don't know how to read? Second, media critics like Noam Chomsky have endowed the phrase with an anti-corporate tone and, in turn, made it a cause célèbre for anti-corporate activists and conspiracy theorists alike. There's a fine line between educating students about dominant stereotypes and editorial considerations during news production, and accusing certain media outlets of having editorial or commercial biases.

The reality is that media literacy is more urgent today than ever before. The Millennial generation has tools at its disposal that empower its members to become citizen journalists and create and experience media in ways previous generations couldn't imagine, let alone develop curricula for.

The media environment is also more challenging for consumers (i.e. not just producers or participants). As the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism found in this year's State of the News Media report, the rise of cable television and Internet news outlets is fomenting "deliberately coarse and provocative" news content and, increasingly, "the line between unfiltered personal thought and public discourse is evaporating." If news is indeed becoming more of a public spectacle than a public utility, young people need to know why this is, what it means for deliberative democracy, and even, perhaps, how to reverse the trend if they so choose.

Young people also need to understand how they're empowered by the vast spectrum of digital media at their disposal, and how to use that power safely and responsibly. The Ad Council has launched several thought-provoking public service announcements about digital exploitation and the potential consequences of sharing and publishing information online.

The campaign reports that 61 percent of 13 to 17 year-olds publish a profile on social networking sites, and one in seven young people receive sexual solicitations over the Internet (70% of which are girls). But kids aren't only the victims. They can be perpetrators, as when it comes to so-called textual harassment" or cyber-bullying.

Obstacles to Information and Media Literacy

Given all this, it's laudable that the "21st Century Skills Incentive Fund Act" has been introduced, and I hope it receives broad support. But there are obstacles to making media literacy a component of public school curricula. One problem is measurement, or the lack thereof. NAMLE's mission is to "ensure that all people have the skills needed to critically analyze and create messages using the wide variety of communication tools now available." This is a worthy goal, but it's broad and its success is not easily measurable. NAMLE concedes that it "defines both education and media broadly," and media literacy -- along with all "21st century skills" -- will certainly come under scrutiny by educators and bureaucrats who seek universal metrics and methodical testing.

My curiosity about the prospects for media literacy education in the testing-heavy era of the "No Child Left Behind" Act led me to attended a panel at the NAMLE conference entitled, "Does It Work? Assessing the Effectiveness of Media Literacy in K-12 Education." The panel featured some of the brightest minds in media literacy, including Renee Hobbs, Cyndy Scheibe, Peter Worth and David Kleeman. Yet there was hardly a consensus on how to create a measurement protocol that can determine whether a certain media literacy curriculum is successful.

Hobbs said that media literacy educators come from dozens of disciplines and so it's difficult to get a unanimity of vision. It's not even clear what should be measured, be it analysis skills, content knowledge, motivation and engagement, attitudes, participation, or some combination of these.

Hopefully, the federal government's loosened purse strings will encourage a more systematic development of these new curricula. It could enable media literacy experts to come together and develop lesson plans that are standardized, age-appropriate, testable and, ultimately, applicable to students' development as informed consumers and citizens.

Photo of Elizabeth Thoman via Oklahmoma State University.

Mark Hannah has spent the past several years conducting sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He specializes in issues and reputation management online. Before joining the PR agency world (v-Fluence Interactive and Edelman), Mark worked for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently conducted advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign. He is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and a fellow at the Society for New Communications Research, and he serves as an awards judge for both organizations. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he's currently pursuing a master's in strategic communications at Columbia University. He is an independent communications consultant based in New York City and the public relations correspondent for MediaShift. You can reach him at markphannah[at]gmail[dot]com.

Public Officials who 'get it'

Some major official figures have genuinely embraced the medium. Karl Rove tweets prolifically, sparring with the Center for American Progress, and publicizing op-eds that he enjoys and with which, of course, he agrees. His Twitter behavior shows someone committed to the kind of conversation and community that typify the medium -- remarkably, he follows nearly as many people as follow him. As a progressive who enjoys intelligent debate, I regularly read Rove's op-eds in the Thursday Wall Street Journal. But until Twitter, the only public rebuttal I could make was muttering under my breath and shaking my head while riding the subway.

Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is another public official that has, I think, used Twitter very effectively. In some ways, Mullen hasn't really embraced the communitarian nature of the Twitter community; for example, his account only follows the high profile tweeters being indexed by WeFollow.com. It is also quite possible that a staffer rather than Mullen himself is uploading the posts. That said, the posts do seem to come directly from Mullen and expose an otherwise unseen side of the country's highest ranking military officer. His posts are chock full of empathy, enthusiasm and gratitude, doling out praise and offering candid status updates.

Here are some representative tweets from Mullen:

Recorded a video greeting to Gold Stars Wives of America. The network of support they offer each other and others in grief inspires me.

Arrived home last night, terrific trip! Rich in experience and feedback. Troops proud of difference they are making, and I am proud of them.

Neither of these men use Twitter to simply advance an agenda, show off their savvy understanding of digital media, or generate publicity for themselves. They use it for different purposes -- Rove for discussion and Mullen for dispatches -- but in ways that are appropriate both for their stations and for the medium.

Officials who don't 'get it'

There's a counter-narrative here, however. In March, political columnist Charlie Cook railed against public officials' use of Twitter:

I have yet to hear a single intelligent remark Twittered by an elected official... The vacuous utterances Twittered daily from members of Congress make me wonder how they have the time to spend keying in on such banalities and marveling over the narcissism implicit in their belief that anyone cares about their every single thought and reaction to contemporaneous events.

To be fair, the eloquence and insight of elected officials is pretty constrained by Twitter's 140 character limit. And there's a learning curve that representatives (and their staffs) have to grapple with when dealing with this new platform.

But if the way we communicate influences the way we think, how might a medium that encourages instantaneous, ineloquent and unsophisticated communication affect our legislators' deliberative processes?

I got a possible answer when I went to TweetCongress.org, which aggregates all of the Twitter feeds of House and Senate members. As I pored through the tweets, I found myself agreeing with Cook's worrying observation. Are our elected officials using Twitter to get around the traditional media filter and communicate directly with their constituents, something, as I've previously observed, the Obama campaign did well? I'll let them speak for themselves:

Paul Ryan (R-WI): Will talk with Brian and the Judge at 10:35 am ET. To listen live: http://www.foxnews.com/radio/brianandthejudge/

Barbara Boxer (D-CA): Gearing up to talk health care w/ Carlos Watson on MSNBC- 11:05am EST, 8:05am PST. Tune in!

Mike Pence (R-IN): I'm on my way to appear on @foxnews with @gretawire at 10 PM EDT to talk about the Democrat #healthbill, the gov't takeover of #healthcare

John McCain (R-AZ): Watch Hannity tonight -- on @ 9:00 pm discussing health care and the need for the right reform!

Christopher Dodd (D-CT): Headed to the Senate floor to speak about Health Care reform. You can watch live on C-Span2

There certainly are some good examples of public officials using Twitter to communicate candidly with new audiences. In addition to Mullen and Rove, the British Prime Minister's office maintains a fine Twitter account, as does Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih.

But watching our elected officials turn their Twitter accounts into publicity outlets for their cable news appearances strikes me as a sort of redundancy ad absurdum. If our representatives continue to fail to use Twitter for its nobler purposes (like thoughtful, if concise, constituent communications), I'll continue to be reminded of this ominous quote from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead":

People want nothing but mirrors around them to reflect them while they're reflecting too. You know, like the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage. Usually in the more vulgar kind of hotels. Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose.

What government officials do you follow on Twitter? Which are your favorites and least favorites? Let us know in the comments below.

Mark Hannah has spent the past several years conducting sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He specializes in issues and reputation management online. Before joining the PR agency world (v-Fluence Interactive and Edelman), Mark worked for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently conducted advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign. He is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and a fellow at the Society for New Communications Research, and he serves as an awards judge for both organizations. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he's currently pursuing a master's in strategic communications at Columbia University. He is an independent communications consultant based in New York City and the public relations correspondent for MediaShift. You can reach him at markphannah[at]gmail[dot]com.

But I've been more interested in the way this story has brought Twitter into the mainstream. That is, not Twitter's effect on the Iranian protests, but the protests' effect on Twitter.

Ok, I'll Join...and So Will the UN Secretary-General

I have a confession: I've made a good chunk of my living recently counseling clients on digital media strategies, yet I myself have abstained from jumping aboard the Twitter bandwagon until this past week. Sure, I've launched Twitter campaigns on behalf of clients and I do consider myself wise in the ways of microblogging best practices. But while I understood how organizations could use this channel to connect with certain audiences, I felt that, for personal correspondence, Twitter had a sort of a navel-gazing, quasi-exhibitionist feel about it. If something's worth sharing with a larger group, isn't it worth more than 140 characters? Besides, I was -- and continue to be -- a stickler for good grammar, so the idea of proudly publishing that SMS-style nouveau scrawl makes me nauseous.

My friend Laura Fitton (who authored the just-released Twitter for Dummies") has been hassling me for quite a while to sign up, but I've been stubborn. Nevertheless, the Western media's reliance on Twitter as a primary source -- along with the technology's power to enable dissent in an otherwise stifling environment -- has inspired me to climb aboard.

Twitter was scheduled to go offline for routine maintenance last week, but the U.S. State Department requested that the service keep the information flow from Iran uninterrupted. If the continuous operation of Twitter is deemed important to our national interest, perhaps there's something to this. Perhaps I should stop being so self-conscious about using such a self-conscious communications tool.

It's not just the State Department that's giving a nod to Twitter in the wake of the protests. The United Nations is adding its voice, too. I've been talking lately with my friend Jim Landale, a public information officer at the UN. Landale's been working on a multiplatform campaign to mark the 100 day countdown to the UN's International Day of Peace. The campaign, called WMD: We Must Disarm, is jettisoning traditional promotional tools in favor of social networks in an effort to reach a "socially active audience." (You can follow the campaign on Twitter here).

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who's shown a willingness to use digital media tools in the past, has even started tweeting. Landale, who was part of the team that encouraged Ban's use of Twitter, shared with me how the Iranian elections have impacted the UN's decision to use Twitter:

This is obviously the first time that a Secretary-General of the United Nations has 'tweeted' and the first time (that we know about) that one of our campaigns has used multiple online platforms at once...There was some skepticism initially within the UN Headquarters at the idea of using Twitter, Facebook and MySpace for such an important campaign, rather than the traditional set of promotional tools, but we managed to overcome this by demonstrating how the campaign would work online...In addition, although we planned the campaign well ahead of the recent elections in Iran, the role Twitter has played in the demonstrations has also probably helped persuade doubters within our own ranks that Twitter and other social networking sites can be an extremely powerful tool.

A Look Forward: Twitter and Limitations

Peggy Noonan, whose column is the sole reason I buy the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, had a thoughtful take on new technology's role in the recent Iran protests. She notes that Twitter and YouTube may have become powerful expression tools for existing sentiment, but acknowledges that they don't, by themselves, create that sentiment. What will be most interesting, she suggests, is how Twitter will be used moving forward. Using the French Revolution as a proxy, she writes:

If they Twittered and live-blogged the French Revolution, it still would have been the French Revolution: 'this aft 3pm @ the bastille.' It all still would have happened, perhaps with marginally greater support...The interesting question is what technology would have done after the Revolution, during the Terror. What would word of the demonic violence, the tumbrels and non-stop guillotines unleashed circa 1790-95 have done to French support for the Revolution, and world support? Would Thomas Jefferson have been able to continue his blithe indifference if reports of France grimly murdering France had been Twittered out each day?

The answer, of course, is "no." And the point, of course, is that Twitter can enrich the newsgathering ability of the mainstream media by acting as an investigative tool, a harbinger of public sentiment , and/or a crowdsourcing device. But Twitter itself is not -- and should not be -- the story here (except for outlets like this that cover this beat). Instead, it's part of the storytelling apparatus. It's no longer a grand phenomenon, but is instead a mere fragment of the mainstream media's new configuration.

Journalists should use Twitter to better understand the Iranian rebellion, not use the Iranian rebellion to tout a "Twitter Revolution." By focusing too heavily -- and headily -- on a simple micro-blogging technology, the news media risk distracting themselves from the more macroscopic, geopolitical issues at play here. If the mainstream news media can't get over its impulse to hype their shiny new tool, they will be enfeebled by the same kind of navel-gazing I thought Twitter was all about...until now.

Mark Hannah has spent the past several years conducting sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He specializes in issues and reputation management online. Before joining the PR agency world (v-Fluence Interactive and Edelman), Mark worked for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently conducted advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign. He is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and a fellow at the Society for New Communications Research, and he serves as an awards judge for both organizations. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he's currently pursuing a master's in strategic communications at Columbia University. He is an independent communications consultant based in New York City and the public relations correspondent for MediaShift. You can reach him at markphannah[at]gmail[dot]com.

Iran protest photo collected but not taken by Misterarasmus via Flickr.

Still, there are several successful examples where online media has been harnessed to promote social change and, as promised, in this post I will I profile two examples. The first was suggested by Sijo Kuruvilla George in the comment thread of my last post. It's a case study I remembered reading about, but was happy to revisit.

India's Pink Chaddi (Underwear) Campaign

Last February, members of the fundamentalist Hindu group Sri Ram Sena attacked a group of women in the Indian city of Mangalore as part of a "moral policing" campaign. The women were drinking together in a bar, and this modern socializing irked right-wing groups in India. According to the BBC, the events "shocked many Indians. Television pictures showed men chasing and beating up the panicking women. Some of the women, who tripped and fell, were kicked by the men." After being released on bail, Sri Ram Sena's leader, Pramod Mutalik, threatened to harass unmarried Indian couples on Valentine's Day, saying "Our activists will go around with a priest, a turmeric stub and a mangalsutra [Indian jewelry that symbolizes marriage] on February 14. If we come across couples being together in public and expressing their love, we will take them to the nearest temple and conduct their marriage."

What better way to counter this reactionary mindset than for four Indian women to start a blog and Facebook group for the "Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women?" On its blog, the group documented the details of attacks in a way that could be useful to police and journalists. They used the Facebook group to collect over 500 pink chaddis (underwear) that they delivered via courier to Pramod Mutalik's office. The tactic brought increased media attention to -- and outrage over -- the attacks. The Hindu nationalist BJP government in the state of Karnataka, which was previously aligned with Sri Ram Sena, publicly criticized the group and the Indian Home Minister said that "Sri Ram Sene is a threat to the country. The Center is watching its activities with great concern."

Why It Worked (In My Humble Opinion)

Social media puts a premium on messages that are provocative and/or humorous. (Have you ever been sent a viral video or e-mail that was neither provocative nor humorous? Unlikely.) This campaign had an element of both. Only skilled and savvy activists would respond to violent assaults with a "gift drive" of pink underwear. Though the campaign's primary tactic was tongue-in-cheek (and a bit of a PR stunt), the message was sincere and included a clear call to action (the blog put step-by-step instructions for sending pink underwear, including locations for collection points and a direct mailing address). Finally, by asking its online audience to join -- and not simply support -- a coalition of "pub-going women," the campaign appealed to the audience's identity instead of emphasizing its own. In doing so, the Pink Chaddi campaign acknowledged and exploited the sometimes ego-centric nature of social media mentioned in my introduction.

The United Nations Foundation's "Nothing But Nets" Campaign

International charities have for years grappled with the problem of malaria in Africa. The disease, spread by infected mosquitoes, is one of the leading killers of children across the continent. When Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly challenged his readers to donate $10 to the purchase of anti-malaria bed nets, the Nothing But Nets (NBN) campaign was born. In partnership with the National Basketball Association's NBA Cares, The United Methodist Church and Sports Illustrated, the UN Foundation has taken NBN online.

The Web site features an interactive net distribution map, which shows how many nets have been distributed in specific countries within Africa. A YouTube channel shows UN workers discussing the project and distributing the nets. Both these online components show donors how their donations are making an impact in a vivid way.

Casual gaming is a phenomenon that's spreading wildly across the Web. While critics dismiss casual games as intra-cubicle time-wasters, these games are played by approximately 200 million people each month ("many of who do not normally regard themselves as gamers"). The NBN campaign has embraced this trend and launched a casual game of its own: Deliver The Net. The player rides a motorcycle through an African village, picking up nets from UN vehicles and delivering them to the villagers he comes across. At the end of the game, it's explained that a $10 donation covers the cost of an insecticide-treated bed net, distributing it, and educating the recipients on how to properly use it -- and then you're invited to donate a real net. Within a few days of launching the game, over 2,500 players donated at least one net.

Why It Worked (In My Humble Opinion)

This game tackles the aforementioned challenge of transferring online enthusiasm to offline action. The game captures the imagination of the prospective donor, putting him in the shoes -- or, in this case, on the motorcycle -- of the UN worker distributing the nets. The motorcyclist in the game is an animation, but photographs are used to depict the villagers he encounters; this lends the game some realism and perceptually bridges the "virtual" distribution of bed nets and the "actual" aid being donated.

What issue advocacy campaigns have you come across (or worked on) that successfully take advantage of the Internet's power to organize, communicate and affect social change?

Mark Hannah has spent the past several years conducting sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He specializes in issues and reputation management online. Before joining the PR agency world (v-Fluence Interactive and Edelman), Mark worked for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently conducted advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign. He is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and a fellow at the Society for New Communications Research, and he serves as an awards judge for both organizations. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he's currently pursuing a master's in strategic communications at Columbia University. He is an independent communications consultant based in New York City and the public relations correspondent for MediaShift. You can reach him at markphannah[at]gmail[dot]com.

This post is an outline of some of the opportunities and challenges facing communicators that seek to tap the Web's grassroots potential. I'll publish a second part in a couple weeks that will spotlight some examples of organizations and individuals who are doing this particularly well. In the meantime, please feel free to e-mail me if you'd like to bring my attention to a specific campaign. Also, check out Fenton Communications' May 5 panel on "Social Media for Social Change" as well as Mike Rosen-Molina's MediaShift post, How Charities Harness Social Media to Raise Awareness, Money.

In its simplest form, issue advocacy is about three things: defining a problem (e.g., social, environmental, economic, etc.), identifying and advocating a specific solution, and motivating action. The most effective advocacy campaigns have been able to weave emotional and rational appeals in a single-minded and salient way. It's important to emphasize that these fundamentals remain mission-critical as communicators take their campaigns online.

Opportunities: Well Suited for Advocacy

The following traits make the Internet a natural venue for issue advocacy and cause marketing:

• Interactive (vs. Informational): While most all other media are one-way modes of communication, the Web encourages direct response. With a few simple mouse clicks, your audience can sign a petition, make a donation, subscribe to a newsletter, or send a letter to an elected official. When social advocates communicate through other media, the goal is often to inspire a belief or attitude that will, at some point, instigate an action. Communicating online allows us to accelerate that process, and make the call-to-action much more immediate.

• Syndicatable (vs. Confined): Content online often takes on a life of its own. Videos and social media widgets are equipped with features that allow bloggers to embed them into their posts, and enthusiasts to email them to friends. "Fair use" law and Creative Commons licensing has encouraged a culture of sharing online. Cause marketers are exploiting synergies when they integrate otherwise separate social media tools. For more on this, see Global Voices Advocacy's guide [PDF file], "Cross-Posting for Advocacy."

• Permanent (vs. Disposable): If I wanted to refer back to my New York Times from two weeks ago, I'd have to go digging through a landfill or snooping though a recycling plant. And unless you're an impulsive Tivo'er, you probably can't exhume a news broadcast of interest after it's aired. Content on the web, however, is immortal. It exists and is discoverable long after it's published. As a result, social marketers who have an active online presence get more persistent mileage than those who shell out for a one-time ad in the daily newspaper, or finagle a placement in a TV news segment.

Challenges: Recognizing and Overcoming Limitations

When planning an issue advocacy campaign online, communicators should be aware and cautious of the following pitfalls:

• Ego-centricity: Alongside the rise of social networking and micro-blogging websites, the Internet has become increasingly ego-centric. Twitter was designed on the premise that people want to broadcast their everyday activities to their friends. Articles have been written about building "personal brands through social networks." People run vanity searches to see how their names appear in search results. This trend runs counter to issue advocates who want to tap people's empathy online. One way of overcoming this obstacle is to present messages that are personalized and made relevant to narrowly targeted audiences online.

• False Intimacy: It can be valuable to track and analyze user-generated content related to your issue or cause. This content can be used like an unfiltered focus group to gain insights into public sentiment. Yet, when listening to -- or participating in -- this conversation, it's important to remember that there are limitations to the reliability of these interactions. Many people communicate anonymously and this gives them leeway to express -- or commit to -- things they might not in face-to-face interactions.

This is one reason why so many people "support" causes on their Facebook pages, but very few actually donate money. (The Washington Post reported last week that "only a tiny fraction of the 179,000 non-profits that have turned to [Facebook] Causes as an inexpensive and green way to seek donations have brought in even $1,000.") My own profession hypes the strategic importance of forging "relationships" online. It's not a bad tactic as long as one recognizes the inherent limitations.

• Transferring Online Enthusiasm to Offline Action: David Vermillion, a former colleague who has executed a lot of successful advocacy campaigns throughout New York City, put it best: "The Holy Grail in issue advocacy is how to advance a public policy goal using the Internet as an organizational tool. How do you translate that [online activity] into offline action... how do you get people to act? How do you get them to physically show up?"

David acknowledged the Internet as an effective means of identifying and accumulating a large quantity of supporters, as well as soliciting opinions and feedback. But his concern with the "diminishing returns" of casual online activism (a.k.a. slacktivism") is common in my profession. Sure there are examples of effective flash mobs and meet-ups that have spurred public policy campaigns, but communicators should be aware of this trend and make sure they have a sound strategy for transferring online support into offline action.

The new media environment presents considerable opportunities to communicate to, interact with, and spur action by supporters (both existing and potential). In the next installment, I'll present case studies in which individuals and organizations are exploiting these opportunities for successful social change.

Mark Hannah has spent the past several years conducting sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He specializes in issues and reputation management online. Before joining the PR agency world (v-Fluence Interactive and Edelman), Mark worked for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently conducted advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign. He is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and a fellow at the Society for New Communications Research, and he serves as an awards judge for both organizations. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he's currently pursuing a master's in strategic communications at Columbia University. He is an independent communications consultant based in New York City and the public relations correspondent for MediaShift. You can reach him at markphannah[at]gmail[dot]com.

As it turns out, the removal was a result of a mere programming error. Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener explained in a statement:

"This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection. It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles -- in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally."

The statement is thoughtful and well-crafted but lacked both punctuality and contrition. Sam Machkovech at Slog observes, "[Amazon's] proper, human response was run through the corporate PR wringer for a full day before finally landing." And Kate Harding over at Salon.com notes, "It's still not a real apology to all the authors and publishers affected, or the customers who had pretty good reason to wonder if Amazon had indeed instated a homophobic and misogynistic corporate policy."

Walking the Walk of Social Media

Now, I know what you're thinking. Did Amazon really deserve the uproarious reaction? Were they the victim or the crime in all of this? The Seattle-based company has a track record of progressive corporate values and the problem was, after all, technical and accidental.

In a conversational medium, it doesn't just matter whether you can walk the walk -- you need to be able to talk the talk as well. With its reader reviews and customer rankings, Amazon is to a large extent a social media company. Why then was its response to this controversy somewhat anti-social?

By waiting so long to issue a statement, the company didn't just allow rumors that the company was discriminatory to circulate, it also allowed a well-known hacker to claim that the ordeal was caused by an organized prank for which he was responsible. Keeping with the maxim that "a lie will go half-way around the world while the truth is putting its boots on," several highly influential blogs (including one on Wired) gave traction to the hacker's false claims.

To be fair, this all unfolded on Easter Sunday. But while 20 Amazon employees were paged, and their attention brought to the #amazonfail meme on Twitter (by the way, more tweets contained this hashtag on Sunday than mentioned "Easter" or "Jesus"), the statement wasn't sent to reporters until Monday afternoon.

Even if the timing of Amazon's statement can be forgiven, the decision to issue a statement to the Associated Press was odd. After all, the AP was not the victim here. Why not write directly to the LGBT customers it offended (albeit unintentionally) or the authors whose book sales were affected? Amazon has plenty of channels through which it could have done this. It could've updated one of its blogs or, of all things, its Twitter feed. I guarantee that the AP and other media outlets would have covered the mea culpa either way.

I often counsel clients on the value of the Internet to bypass traditional media channels and communicated directly with customers (and other stakeholders). In this case, Amazon seems to have bypassed the concerned customers who were questioning its policies and taken its "glitch" message to the traditional media. There's a reason that media relations is only a small subset of public relations -- in this case it wasn't the right tool to reach for. Tech consultant Deanna Zandt summed up the lessons for Amazon on how not to handle a social media rampage.

Since Amazon issued its statement, a new hashtag has emerged: #sorryamazon. But the majority of tweets still contain the #amazonfail tag (and some are tracking along at #glitchmyass). Most folks it seems are in the mood for getting -- not giving -- an apology. As Twitterer MackStone writes, "I'm seeing 'we glitched'. That's not the same as 'we're sorry.' Apology notable by its absence."

One of the great ironies here has gone largely unnoticed: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos believes in Twitter so much that he's one of its major funders. It will be interesting to see whether he directs his company to issue the apology that Twitter users are pining for. In the vast Amazon that is the Twittersphere, the natives are getting restless.

Editor's Note: Be sure to vote in our poll about #AmazonFail and have your say!

Mark Hannah has spent the past several years conducting sensitive public affairs campaigns for well-known multinational corporations, major industry organizations and influential non-profits. He specializes in issues and reputation management online. Before joining the PR agency world (v-Fluence Interactive and Edelman), Mark worked for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign as a member of the national advance staff. He's more recently conducted advance work for the Obama-Biden campaign. He is a member of the Public Relations Society of America and a fellow at the Society for New Communications Research, and he serves as an awards judge for both organizations. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he's currently pursuing a master's in strategic communications at Columbia University. He is an independent communications consultant based in New York City and the public relations correspondent for MediaShift. You can reach him at markphannah[at]gmail[dot]com.

Photo of Jeff Bezos by Mathieu Thouvenin via Flickr.