In the past, any truly public analysis of the performance of the candidates had to wait until the event was over, when the usual political operatives and pundits like former Clinton advisor James Carville would be called on by CNN or Fox News to pick a winner, criticize the moderator, or handicap future debates. We’ve always had real-time, horse-race-style discussion of these events, but it has almost always taken place in small groups — in bars, or at local viewing events, etc. Never before has there been a way to eavesdrop on a giant conversation about such a thing as it happens.

Game-time commentary: Good or bad?

That kind of game-time handicapping is great fun when it’s the Super Bowl, or the Academy Awards, or some other event with less at stake (although football fans might disagree about that description). But presidential debates — in theory, at least — are supposed to be important elements in the political process, which help undecided voters make up their minds and therefore can ultimately affect the course of political history. Does Twitter help or harm that process?

Hey Obama -- TRAIN WITH HILLARY. This is ROCKY III and she's your Apollo Creed. #eyeofthetiger

—
Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) October 04, 2012

Some would argue the political process is something of a circus anyway, and that carefully stage-managed events like the debates are already a sideshow with little political value — and therefore the additional theatrical element added by real-time commentary isn’t going to have much effect. Many parts of the process are probably also ephemeral, and likely to die out relatively quickly: will there be long-term political repercussions from Mitt Romney’s mention of shutting down PBS, fueled by all of the parody accounts devoted to Big Bird and other characters that Twitter produced? Unlikely.

An optimist would say there is something very real to be gained by having people watch such debates for any reason — even if it’s just to follow along with the wisecracks on Twitter — because then at least there is a chance they might accidentally become more informed about political issues. According to Twitter’s graph of discussions during the debate, some of the biggest peaks in tweets-per-minute came when the two candidates were discussing Medicare. Were most of those jokes or partisan attacks, or did they actually contribute to anyone’s understanding of the issues? That’s hard to say.

The spin cycle is now measured in minutes

The rise of Twitter as a political force has definitely accelerated the metabolism of a campaign by orders of magnitude, to the point where political analysts now talk about a news cycle that is measured in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. Is that ultimately a good thing for politics or democracy? Some have argued that it is beneficial in part because trumped-up stories or blind alleys can be defused much more quickly, or burn themselves out rather than dominating the spin cycle. But a chorus of Twitter responses can also add fuel to something that might not actually be meaningful.

“I can’t watch a debate anymore without having my iPhone in my hand. I don’t feel like I’m having the full experience if I’m not reading the reaction in real time.” — NBC News chief digital officer Vivian Schiller

On the plus side, some pointed out that Twitter users watching television and following along with the real-time discussion were clearly better off than the professional journalists who were attending the debate — and theoretically were supposed to provide some kind of expert analysis later — since all of those reporters were stuck in a separate room with a balky audio and video feed. And as Alex Howard at O’Reilly noted, it might have changed the debate in some interesting ways if some of the smart commentary and questions from Twitter users had actually made it into the debate itself.

During the debate, even some Obama supporters (at least the ones in my stream) seemed to quickly come to the conclusion that the President was off his game, that he was tired or even uninterested, and that Romney gained the upper hand by being more forceful. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith actually declared Romney the winner only 42 minutes into the event. Those impressions were then reinforced by the pundits on the post-game talk shows. Within an hour, the story of the debate seemed to be that Obama had “lost” and Romney had “won,” even though some said the Republican candidate contradicted himself at a number of points.

Is any of that going to have a lasting effect on voters’ decisions, or the way that the campaigns react? Or is it just ephemera that will be gone in a matter of days, as Twitter users become infatuated with some other celebrity event or perceived injustice? It’s clear that for both voters and politicians, and the political operatives who run their campaigns, the Twitter-sphere’s instantaneous reaction to events is a reality they have to take into account — and it could be changing the way we engage with political issues in some important ways. Whether that’s good or bad remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Aih and Shutterstock/iQoncept

After giving a kind of whirlwind tour of the open-source movement in his talk, including the rise of Linux, Shirky devoted much of his discussion to Github — a kind of crowdsourced platform for maintaining code that Linux creator Linus Torvalds also created, which allows anyone to edit, to “fork” or create their own version, and to track the changes that others make. It’s not a big stretch to get from that idea to the idea of crowdsourcing legislation, which is what Shirky seems to have in mind, and there have already been some attempts at doing this via Github: for example, a German software developer has uploaded all of Germany’s laws to the platform so that citizens can recommend and track changes.

It’s an intriguing idea: that a simple software platform aimed at collaboration could change the way legislation is developed and implemented, much like the process that powers Wikipedia has created a crowdsourced encyclopedia that evolves and changes over time. But is it realistic? There were plenty of skeptics who said Wikipedia would never succeed, and yet it has an excellent track record when it comes to reliability, despite some hiccups in the process, such as the recent incident involving author Philip Roth. That said, however, there are also plenty of critics who believe that the “cabal” of editors who control the crowd-powered encyclopedia have too much authority.

Of course, some would argue that we’re already in that kind of situation with most governments anyway, and therefore Github couldn’t make things any worse. And Shirky is not the only one to make this argument: developer Abe Voelker has proposed a “Github for laws” that would take exactly the same approach to crafting and crowdsourcing legislation. There have also been some initial experiments with similar ideas — including Iceland’s new constitution and similar types of project in Finland and Ireland — which shows that others are also open to the concept.

One of the problems with applying a technical solution like Github to a massive cultural and political process like government, however, is that creating laws — even small ones — is very different from changing a piece of code so that Linux can duplicate Windows-style typefaces, or changing the Wikipedia entry on George Bush. And if even those kinds of prosaic examples can lead to the equivalent of a Linux or Wikipedia holy war, which in many cases they have, what hope do we have that politicians can actually use a similar process to change the way that government works? As Shirky suggests in his talk, there’s also a pretty entrenched bureaucracy that has become part of most governments and likely has no interest in relinquishing that control to the crowd.

In his book “Here Comes Everybody,” Shirky described the potentially massive impact of crowdsourcing and crowd-powered social change, and his admiration of Github seems to be part of an attempt to find tools that will help us deal with the tidal wave of human-driven collaboration. This is something we clearly need, so it’s worthwhile to start looking at solutions — and while Github may not be the answer, at this point just about anything is probably worth a shot.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Fabio Venni

The Yahoo bureau chief’s comment came during the setup for a video broadcast by ABC News and Yahoo News during the Republican national convention in Tampa, Florida on Wednesday. As an audio clip of the incident posted at Newsbusters.org shows, Chalian was talking to someone on the program about the interview that was to come — which was apparently going to touch on the damage being caused by Hurricane Isaac during the convention — and the Yahoo staffer seems to be encouraging this person to describe the Romney campaign’s lack of interest by telling them:

“Feel free to say: ‘They’re not concerned at all. They are happy to have a party with black people drowning.’”

Why do we pretend journalists don’t have opinions?

As Jack Shafer of Reuters puts it in a post about Chalian’s dismissal, “Yahoo counted to one and then fired [him].” The company quickly put out a statement apologizing to the Romney campaign, saying the bureau chief’s comment was inappropriate and “doesn’t represent the views of Yahoo.” Chalian himself posted comments on Facebook and on Twitter, saying he was “profoundly sorry for making an inappropriate and thoughtless joke.” Within hours, dozens of blog posts and news articles were warning reporters about the dangers of a “hot mic,” and how their personal thoughts or opinions can get them in trouble if they are not always on guard.

New York Times media writer David Carr argued that the incident highlights how difficult it is for journalists to try and cover something like a convention for multiple platforms like the web and television, saying reporters sometimes “fall into the crevices when trying to cross from one platform to the other.” But is that really the point we should be taking away from Chalian’s dismissal? I don’t think so — and neither does Shafer, who says that the real problem is the expectation on the part of media companies that journalists like Chalian will never express an opinion, let alone joke about something important. As he describes it:

“The journalistic orthodoxy… maintains that news reporters and news editors must not have opinions, or if they do, they must not state them.”

One of the things that is so frustrating about the Chalian incident is that the former Yahoo bureau chief wasn’t even expressing his own opinion about what the Romney campaign thinks about Hurricane Isaac, or the fate of black people. As far as I can tell from the audio, he was simply making a humorous suggestion about something outrageous that a person might theoretically say about the Romneys — I would argue that there’s virtually zero chance he actually wanted his guest to make the comment he referred to.

As Shafer points out, this kind of joking around is so common in newsrooms and anywhere journalists gather (courtrooms, stakeouts, etc.) that it is second nature for many reporters, and the more outrageous the comment is, the better. In some ways, the internet and social media are like one giant “hot mic,” making the likelihood that a journalist will broadcast such witticisms almost overwhelming. And Twitter also allows those with thoughtful — but controversial — opinions to be tarred and feathered as well, as former CNN editor and producer Octavia Nasr was for a comment she made on Twitter about the death of a Hezbollah leader.

Seeing journalists as human makes journalism better

In the end, this is about more than just whether journalists should be allowed to joke or not, or even whether Chalian’s comment reflected his real opinions about the Romneys. As more of what we call journalism gets done in public, whether via Twitter or some other social tool, we are getting more of a view into the process by which journalism is created, and it is often messy and all too human (which brings to mind the quote attributed to German chancellor Otto von Bismarck: “If you enjoy the law or sausages, you should not watch either one being made.”)

As I’ve tried to argue before, in writing about the blinkered social-media policies that media outlets impose on their staff — which restrict them from ever expressing an opinion about a topic they cover, and in some cases even about topics they don’t cover — trying to squeeze the humanness out of what journalists do is a step in exactly the wrong direction. We need to encourage more transparency rather than less, because there are so many sources of information now that the old “journalist as impartial oracle” approach, or what Jay Rosen calls the “View From Nowhere,” simply no longer works (and was a fiction in any case). As Shafer puts it:

“Reporters and editors have opinions, and sometimes they’re going to express them, much to their embarrassment and to the horror of their bosses, who want to pretend that everybody on staff resembles Lady Justice blindfolded, holding a balance.”

If anything, journalists who are not afraid to show their human side can actually be more effective, and National Public Radio editor Andy Carvin was a great example of that during the uprisings in Egypt and Libya. It’s also why I think it’s better in many cases for fact-checking to be done in public. Are some journalists going to say offensive or even stupid things? Of course they are. Everyone does. So should a single remark that someone makes on Twitter, or over an open microphone, disqualify them from ever being able to practice journalism? Even a veteran newsman like Sam Donaldson doesn’t think so. Why does Yahoo?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Steve Jurvetson and Rosaura Ochoa

As Andrew Beaujon at Poynter describes in a post about the response to Ryan’s speech, the Republican VP’s comments about what President Obama did or didn’t do appear to have set a new high-water mark for political fabrication and there have been a series of prominent fact-checking pieces that have taken the speech apart piece by piece to demonstrate that — including one at Salon magazine, and even one at Fox News. A special news app the Washington Post built even allows readers to watch the video and go through the speech line-by-line, with fact-checks inserted.

The Washington Post also did a feature on the entire first night of the convention, awarding the Republican party “four Pinocchios” — complete with graphics of the long-nosed puppet — for their repeated distortions of a quote from President Obama. And of course there were reports from the traditional fact-checking outlets Politifact and FactCheck.org, which also noted the vast discrepancies between Ryan’s comments and the truth. Tthe Huffington Post notes that many reporters were publicly calling out Ryan’s distortions and untruths on Twitter during the speech:

this new debt commission Ryan is extoling? Ryan was on it and voted against its report.

—
Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) August 30, 2012

The New York Times ran a piece about Ryan’s speech that didn’t pull any punches about the mis-statements contained in it, saying up front that the candidate “made several statements that were incorrect, incomplete, or incompatible with his own record in Congress.” A number of observers praised it for being devoted to unambiguous fact-checking — as opposed to the kind of fake balance that Rosen has complained about in what he calls the “View From Nowhere,” where even the most absurd claims are treated as equally deserving of space as the truth.

Has political journalism changed? Not really

So if all of this has been happening — along with repeated fact-checking of Mitt Romney’s comments and ads by the campaign — can we be satisfied that traditional media outlets are doing the job, along with dedicated sites like Politifact and FactCheck.org? Not really. If anything, the fact that all of this checking is being noticed and publicly applauded reinforces the reality that it is still an unusual activity. The response from CNN’s political host Wolf Blitzer, which Glenn Greenwald describes in a seething post at The Guardian, is typical of the reaction that speeches like Ryan’s get from many outlets, even when they are riddled with lies.

As New York magazine writer Frank Rich pointed out in an interview on Reddit as part of that site’s “Ask Me Anything” feature (which the president took part in on Wednesday in a historic first), even having special reports or features that focus on “fact checking” is an admission that fact-checking doesn’t occur during the regular process of reporting many news stories. As he puts it:

“It is embarrassing (and depressing) that “fact-checker” is now a journalistic gimmick rather than part of the actual process of reporting stories as they emerge… We have lived in the age of Truthiness ever since the Bush administration successfully sold a war in Iraq on pure fiction, which much of the press, including nearly all the major journalistic institutions, going along for the ride. For all the soul-searching that followed that journalistic debacle, I’m not sure that much has changed, sadly.”

The public editor of the New York Times triggered an earlier flame-war over this phenomenon when he asked in a column whether readers expected reporters for the paper to be “truth vigilantes” who challenged candidates and politicians directly on their untrue statements — and the most common response seemed to be shock and outrage that the newspaper hadn’t already been doing exactly that. But as former newspaper editor Dan Conover noted in a recent post, fact-checking of the political kind (as opposed to hard facts like place names or dates) requires a newspaper or journalistic outlet to have a firm position, and that’s not something objective journalists are supposed to do:

“Until a media company rejects the ‘fair and balanced view from nowhere’ that we called ‘journalistic objectivity,’ it simply can’t independently evaluate anything. Just as surveyors must establish a reference point before they begin measuring property lines, so too must journalists find and announce a meaningful perspective before they attempt to measure truth.”

James Fallows at The Atlantic says he is hopeful that in the response to Ryan’s speech, we are seeing the construction of a mainstream press that can cope with what he calls “post-truth politics.” But part of the problem is that once the election campaign is over, even many political journalists will likely go back to the way they used to write and report and think about their coverage, because the source of the most egregious kinds of obvious lies — politicians campaigning for election — will be gone.

Why can’t we have the kind of fact-checking we’ve seen over the past few days all the time? Some newspapers are trying to build tools with which to do that, like the Washington Post‘s “Truth Teller” project, for which it got financing from the Knight Foundation. But more than anything, we need more sources that are willing to call a lie a lie — which is what blogs and alternative sources like Reddit are good at, since they don’t feel a compulsion to adhere to the “view from nowhere” — and more traditional media outlets that are willing to look outside their own newsrooms.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Hans Gerwitz and jphilipg

The Politico piece, about an incident on Friday involving presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, calls it the “21-minute news cycle.” As Dylan Byers describes it, Romney made a comment at a campaign stop in Michigan about how no one had ever asked him for his birth certificate — a crack that appeared to refer to the controversial “birther” debate over where President Barack Obama was born. Within a matter of seconds, a reporter attending the event had posted the remark to Twitter, where it was then retweeted hundreds of times over the next few minutes (according to data Politico got from the Twitter-analytics service Topsy).

Political brush fires can erupt within minutes

Several minutes later, Politico and BuzzFeed had both posted items on it making the connection to the “birther” debate, and BuzzFeed had posted a video to YouTube of Romney making the statement. Within minutes, the Romney campaign had issued a comment saying the remark was taken out of context and that the candidate did not mean to dredge up the birth certificate issue again — a statement that was followed quickly by one from the Obama camp, which accused Romney of doing exactly that. Over the next few hours the news made its way to TV news shows and elsewhere, but most of the heat from the incident had more or less died down by the end of the day, and Byers noted that the event is a perfect example of how things have changed:

“Four years ago, the fallout from a controversial remark would have taken hours, if not a full day, to unfold. In 2012, social media, which enables reporters to file in real-time and puts increased pressure on campaigns to speed up their response time, has brought the pace of the news cycle down to a matter of minutes and seconds. The ‘one-day story’ — itself an archaic term in the 21st century — has become the one-hour story.”

This phenomenon is something we discussed at the paidContent 2012 conference in New York earlier this year, during a panel that I moderated with Vivian Schiller of NBC News and Josh Marshall of the political blog network Talking Points Memo. As Marshall described it, social media — including blogs such as his, which started the process that was later accelerated by Twitter and Facebook — have not only sped up the news cycle but have added new “vectors” that political analysts of all kinds have to take account of. In other words, instead of just paying attention to the New York Times and one or two political talk shows, everyone has to pay attention to Twitter as well, and to new sources of political content such as BuzzFeed and Huffington Post.

You could argue that the tendency for inconsequential or even irrelevant incidents to get blown out of proportion has increased thanks to Twitter and the appearance of “viral content” sites like BuzzFeed (which has been making a big push into the political sphere since it hired former Politico writer Ben Smith) and that is probably true. But then, such incidents also got blown out of proportion by television talk shows and news programs and newspaper columnists before blogs and Twitter and Facebook came along. In many ways, all those tools have done is speed up and enhance a process that has been under way for decades.

Irrelevant stories also burn out faster

During our conversation in June about social media and political coverage, Schiller also argued that the speed with which Twitter and other networks operate can be beneficial as well — since it can help defuse or tamp down an incorrect or ridiculous report that might otherwise have taken hours or even days to disprove through traditional media channels. As Byers noted in his story, the Romney comment might have turned into a multiple-day issue, as newspapers picked it up and it worked its way through the usual sources of political commentary, but instead it was mostly out of gas within a few hours. As reporter Sasha Issenberg put it:

“These little stories catch fire on Twitter more quickly than they did even with bloggers in 2008, but it also means that they burn out faster.”

There’s another element of Twitter and social media that could be beneficial during an election campaign, and that is the way that such tools allow for sources directly connected to events to comment and affect the news flow — something that could help alleviate the “pack journalism” effect that Jeff Jarvis and others have complained about, in which thousands of reporters congregate at a single event and repeat the same kinds of information over and over. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has written about how social media can be an effective tool to combat this phenomenon during events such as the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere, because it allows other non-traditional sources to become part of the narrative.

This phenomenon of having “the sources go direct,” as blogging pioneer Dave Winer has described it, is probably one of the biggest disruptive effects that Twitter has introduced into political journalism — and its impact, both positive and negative, is only going to become more obvious as the nation gets closer to the election. Whether it is primarily good or bad depends a lot on your perspective. Is it bad because there is more sound and fury that signifies nothing, or is it good because irrelevant stories burn themselves out more quickly and the sources of information have become broader?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users See-ming Lee and Nils Geylen

When the decision came down, that commitment came through. While some traditional outlets, including CNN, Fox News and even NPR’s Diane Rehm, went with an instant — wrong — read of an intricate opinion, the blog founded by attorneys Howe and her husband Tom Goldstein, who handle cases that go to the Supreme Court, held steady. But this isn’t your typical bloggers-over-journalists story: the not-so-secret sauce at SCOTUSblog is Lyle Denniston, the dean of the Supreme Court press corp who meshes 50-plus years of traditional journalism experience and sensibilities with a 24/7, real-time platform. (Howe describes him as “full time and then some.”)

When we spoke a couple of days before the decision, Denniston talked about his own careful reporting style and how that fits with his desire to show that online journalism can be trusted:

“We do like to think we are competitive and we love it when we are out in front of other media but basically being first is not the most important thing for us. It’s being first AND accurate at the same time. … Unfortunately, a lot of the internet has a reputation of not being accurate.”

So the team at SCOTUSblog took three long minutes from getting the ruling to reporting that Chief Justice John Roberts led the 5-4 majority declaring the Obama administration had a mandate, then another two minutes to declare the whole ACA was upheld with the exception of narrow reading on Medicare. Howe almost instantly mentioned the part about the mandate being judged a tax but held off on the rest. The screengrab from the CoveritLive replay below covers that three minutes:

They used Twitter to get the word out a few seconds ahead of the live blog. If that’s all someone wanted, they didn’t have to add to the server traffic.

#SCOTUS upholds #ACA individual mandate.

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 28, 2012

Overnight sensation but not an overnight success

Fueled by interest in high-profile, politically polarizing cases, SCOTUSblog may be an overnight sensation but it isn’t an overnight success — and health care didn’t make it a go-to site. But visits have snowballed, aided by links from Matt Drudge and Instapundit for people following the health care or immigration cases. On one recent “decision day” they had about 97,000 people logged in concurrently on the live blog, most of them issue shopping. “When I typed the words ‘no health care today’ the numbers just dropped,” Howe recalled during an interview between immigration and health care decision days.

The influx means the user mix has changed considerably. Where once it was primarily those with some knowledge about how the often-byzantine Supreme Court operates, now the questions they get during a live session run the gamut. “We do have ways of chronicling or monitoring,” said Denniston, “but the only way we know about what kind of people is to read their questions, see if whether sophisticated or naive.” The high-traffic days bring more queries, too, ranging from questions about how decisions are drafted (by law clerks with varying degrees of involvement by the justices) and delivered to points of law. The immigration live blog drew roughly 3,400 comments and questions.

Howe says trying to balance those needs has been a challenge lately. If she explains “what it means to be pre-empted without having indicated that I was responding to questions then I get people who say don’t insult our intelligence. You just can’t win.”

But it also gives them a better chance to bring in new users for their Plain English section, where cases are explained primarily for people without a legal background or without enough of one to pull out the finer points from the usual legalese.

Howe added, “It’s helpful for us, we’re used to operating on the assumption that there’s a basic knowledge about the court.” The polarizing cases also bring a change in tone. “We see a change in tenor in the comments certainly, but I don’t think it’s changed the tenor of the blog.”

For Denniston, it hearkens back to the days when he was covering the court for the Boston Globe — writing for the average newspaper reader as well as court observers. “We want to have more and more people who are not judges and lawyers reading our blog,” Denniston said. They also want to bring readers back between cases and between sessions by “constantly trying to enlarge the fascination factor of our audience.”

It’s all part of the changing mission of a niche blog closing in on its tenth anniversary.

Probably more traffic today than in SB’s first 5 years, combined. So grateful; a little scared. #teamlyle #dontcrash

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 28, 2012

‘Useless business development tool’

Asked when SCOTUSblog was founded, Howe thought back to another family milestone in late 2002: “I was about 7 months pregnant with our first child when we started the blog and she will be 10 in January.” It was Goldstein’s idea, founded for promotion to encourage business development for their own firm Goldstein & Howe, P.C.. Howe thought it was a terrible idea at first but agreed it was worth trying.

She explained, “We thought these were things we should be doing anyway as part of our practice. It turns out it didn’t work that way at all,” Howe said. “It was a useless business development tool. Eventually we switched from being a business development tool to regarding ourselves as a tool for public information.” It wasn’t designed to make money on its own.

That realization came around the same time that newsrooms started cutting back, she said, devoting fewer resources to places like the Supreme Court. It fit in with the couple’s interests in teaching law; they teach appellate courses at Stanford and Harvard. Denniston started writing for them in late 2004, adding a new dimension to the site.

They’re transparent about clients and cases they take to the Supreme Court but anything promotional goes on the firm’s site. They also decided not to get into politics and do as much as they can to keep political views out of the blog. They even make sure that posts by experts arguing one side of a case only run paired with one in favor of the other side.

When Goldstein moved to Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, LLP. in 2006 to establish a Supreme Court practice there, the larger firm became the blog’s sponsor. The sponsorship stayed in place when Goldstein rejoined Howe and her partner Kevin Russell at Howe & Russell 18 months ago. The firm’s name changed to Goldstein & Russell — and the sponsorship changed late last year.

Instead of a law firm, SCOTUSblog is sponsored by Bloomberg Law as a way to expose law students to legal information products competing with WestLaw and Lexis.

While Howe wouldn’t talk specific numbers, she said, “The Bloomberg sponsorship has been tremendous. We’re still not paying Lyle what he deserves to be paid but it’s more in line.” They’ve also been able to hire a full-time blog manager and other staff plus invest in technology. Goldstein told live blog users Thursday that it would cost about $25,000 to handle the traffic “for the 20 minutes between 10:15 and 10:35am, and mostly for the first 30 seconds or so.” Poynter and the Nieman Journalism Lab have written about the tech back flips and expenses it took to keep SCOTUSblog up and running over the past few weeks.)

Appx 1M simultaneous readers. 3.4M hits so far. Survived one major hacking attack. Got it right. So grateful to all.

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 28, 2012

In the past, Howe said, they linked to the court or to publicly available copies of decisions. Now SCOTUSblog uses “gazillions of document links” to Bloomberg Law. It’s easier and faster. Bloomberg links to the blog, too.

Always a reader out there

The shift hasn’t helped them in one area: credentialing. No one from SCOTUSblog has a hard pass, the golden ticket to the Supreme Court press room, as a correspondent for the site. Early on, Howe says they were told the site didn’t qualify under Congressional Gallery rules that ban lobbying.

Denniston came with his own hard pass, credentialed through Boston radio station WBUR. The lawyers are all members of the Supreme Court bar so have some access that way. It’s not an ideal situation but Howe said, “Lyle’s not going to retire ever.”

Technically Denniston has retired from journalism before. He just hasn’t stopped doing it. Howe says she often edits two posts late at night, then wakes up to find he posted yet another one before he logged off. When I mentioned that, Denniston told me he likes knowing “no matter what time you put something on the internet there’s always a reader out there, at least one.”

The biggest difference between newspapers and now, he told me, isn’t the screen; it’s the way he works. “I have no assignments, no editors and no deadlines so I work all the time.” He’s still a phone-and-shoe-leather reporter but says he couldn’t survive without the internet for research.

While some of his contemporaries — heck, even a lot of younger journalists — are still crotchety about online journalism, Denniston skipped that stage. He’s not into social media, even though the Twitter #teamlyle because a trending hashtag over the last couple of weeks. (Howe doubts he could write in 140 character chunks.)

He likes the cooperative spirit online and the ability to move between the conversational live blog, which he compares to an old live-radio show, and the more formal pieces he writes. “Basically I’m still writing stories for an electronic display the same way I did for a print display,” Denniston said. “The same kind of professional disciplines are at work.”

He knows there are some who have had trouble making a similar transition. His message to them: “If some in print are intimidated by the prospect of communicating via the internet, they should get over it.”

What next?

With the formal end of the session in sight, it’s back to business mostly as usual for SCOTUSblog, There are posts to write, a site to update and a new session to get ready for. Denniston is already looking ahead to affirmative action case about college students and gay marriage as two of the high-profile cases when the court resumes on the first Monday of October, around the time the blog officially turns 10.

A decade is a lot of time in internet years. Is the passion still there? Howe says yes, they have a lot more left to do:

The longer we do it the more we realize … I feel like we have helped to create this sort of institution and I think it would be very hard to give up.

For the unfamiliar, BuzzFeed is the brain child of technology and marketing whiz Jonah Peretti, who delights in churning out stories with pretty pictures for the “bored at work” crowd. The site’s bread and butter is stuff like “37 Items the Kardashians have slapped their name on” and “Flock of Angry Kittens gets a Bath” that are intended to generate a maximum amount of Twitter and Facebook hoopla. BuzzFeed  recently launched a politics vertical that offers items like “Eight Images from Mitt Romney’s business career” and “A Very Sad Picture of Newt Gingrich.”

So why is the ever-serious New York Times getting mixed up with this potpourri of pop culture reporting? The move is actually a shrewd one.

First, BuzzFeed recently hired Politico’s Ben Smith to lead up its politics vertical. Smith is one of the very best political reporters of his generation and he made his name in the online environment. His presence will give the NYT-Buzzfeed venture both gravitas and tactical guidance (in addition to the silly stuff, BuzzFeed’s political coverage has also included insightful coverage of health care, immigration and more). The new web video presence will also complement the Times fledgling online show TimesCast Politics.

Second, the New York Times stands to learn of a ton of new social media tricks. Unlike traditional news outlets, BuzzFeed is all about turbo-charging stories for social channels, an approach that recognizes that social is increasingly driving online news consumption. This means that the Times has an opportunity here not only to increase the visibility of its convention coverage but also to develop tools it can employ in other areas of its reporting. The Times could, for instance, be in a position to bring a BuzzFeed-like touch to its MOMA reviews or its World Series coverage.

Finally, a bit of BuzzFeed brashness will be a welcome addition to often dull convention coverage. The gatherings that once provided high political drama are now little more than tedious tub-thumping pageants — maybe more viral video will change that.

“We think BuzzFeed’s energy and keen ear for how political stories play out in the social sphere will be a valuable and interesting contribution to The Times’s video presence,” said Jim Roberts, assistant managing editor of The New York Times in a press release.

[Image by Muriel via Shutterstock]

Politics used to be a very controlled and almost theatrical process, with politicians and other political actors appearing in carefully scripted events — and the reporting and analysis of those events was also restricted to certain specific media channels: a couple of TV networks, one or two major newspapers, and so on. Now that we have blogs and Twitter and other forms of social media, how has that changed the nature of both the political process and the media reporting of that process? At paidContent 2012 in New York recently, I asked Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall and NBC News digital head Vivian Schiller for their perspective on that question and you can hear their answers in the video embedded below.

Marshall, the editor and publisher of the ground-breaking political blog network, said that social media has really just accelerated the process of breaking down those traditional barriers — a process that started with the arrival of blogs about a decade ago:

I see it as a progression over the past dozen or so years, of a more and more frictionless news cycle, and what we’re today calling social media has just accelerated that. The other major transformation is an increase in key vectors in the news — the way the New York Times used to be a dominant vector in how news was propagated, along with the big TV networks and other big metropolitan dailies. With the growth of blogs and the beginnings of social media, you have a more fluid and unstable ecosystem of news.

Schiller, who was previously CEO at National Public Radio before joining NBC’s news division, said that for a media entity like NBC, social media has a way of amplifying the stories that come up in other formats. For three weeks in a row, she said, comments that politicians — including Cory Booker, Jamie Dimon and Joe Biden — made on the TV program Meet The Press became a national story thanks to the power of social media. “Meet The Press is about as old media as you can get,” said Schiller. “But those events ricocheted around the world — that’s social media.”

Both the panelists also said that one of the positive things about social media and its role in the news and political ecosystem is that some events that are trivial or unworthy of attention can “burn out” more quickly when they are exposed to the glare of Twitter and the blogosphere, whereas they might have taken on a life of their own and dominated the discussion in newspapers or on TV networks before social media. And Schiller said despite the fact that Twitter and other forms of social media can be filled with a lot of worthless noise, overall the impact has been positive for both politics and the media as a whole:

Of course there’s a lot of garbage in social media, but there’s a lot of garbage in every form of media, from the beginning of time. But I think that all of the kinds of access and the ways people can interact with content, for politics, it’s all good.

Marshall appeared with Vivian Schiller, chief digital officer of NBC News at the paidContent 2012 conference, where the two talked about how social media has influenced and reshaped the news business. Marshall said social media is part of a larger continuum that began with the Internet and the rise of blogs. With social media, he said, the news business has become frictionless and fluid and, in some cases, chaotic. But it’s helped wrest control away from traditional news powers and helped do away with the notion of a news cycle.

“Parties and counter-parties can get back into a story rapidly, whether it’s on Twitter or this or that.  It’s about immediate access so a story can play out without the slow down of a news cycle,” Marshall said.

Vivian Schiller said social media has become an organic part of news organizations, which are finding that it can be a liberating force, providing new ways to engage their audience and also push out content. She said social media is also helpful in weeding out trivial news, while allowing more voices to be heard on bigger stories.

“I think because there’s so many people who have access to the same information, you get more data points and more information  from the crowd and more debunking.  And everything becomes meatier,” Schiller said.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).