(Community Matters) more to think about than agree with at this point.
from Politico’s Playbok:
CLICK DU JOUR: PETER HAMBY’s 95-page reported paper, “Did Twitter Kill the Boys on the Bus? Searching for a better way to cover a campaign,” written when the CNN political reporter was a spring fellow at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy : “[John] Dickerson’s take: ‘If I were running an actual news division, I would probably ban people from Twitter in some way.’ That Dickerson, one of the more forward-thinking and tech-savvy reporters in the business, would even consider such an idea speaks to how frustrated many campaign veterans are with today’s shoot-first-and-update-later style of political journalism. David Carr of The New York Times said he would enact a curt but elegant Twitter policy if he were running campaign coverage: ‘Tweet less, dear colleagues.’ ‘I unfollowed a lot of political reporters, because you are tweeting for your colleagues, you are not tweeting for me,’ Carr said. ‘I would say, put the phone in your pocket. Start focusing on the people that are in front of you. Don’t worry about so much what the other guy is doing. Be willing to play off the ball.'” http://hvrd.me/17yDiRD
–DAVID CARR’s “The Media Equation” column on the Business front of today’s N.Y. Times, “Campaign Journalism In the Age of Twitter “: “At 32, [Hamby] is deeply immersed in the digital frontier of modern journalism – with a somewhat provocative presence on Twitter … According to Mr. Hamby, Mitt Romney’s campaign … fenced off the candidate from the very people he needed to reach. ‘With Instagram and Twitter-primed iPhones, an ever more youthful press corps, and a journalistic reward structure in Washington that often prizes speed and scoops over context, campaigns are increasingly fearful of the reporters who cover them,’ he writes … The reporters and editors Mr. Hamby spoke to for his … report said that the Romney campaign’s decision to fence off its candidate and to staff its press effort with equally young people was a grievous tactical error. Because the staff on the bus or plane would not really confirm or deny anything, that left many idle hands that created much mischief. In an attempt to exercise total control over the message, the campaign lost all control in bits and pieces, so when things went wrong, as they did during Mr. Romney’s European visit, they went very, very wrong. …
“The death of the hallowed political reporter Jack Germond a few weeks ago served as a vivid reminder that the hallowed day story – a totemic representation of How It Was – has given way to a mosaic of posts on Twitter and blogs that form a running, constantly updated feed. … Hamby suggested that politicians who came of age in the Twitter era – Gov. Chris Christie, Gov. Martin O’Malley, Senator Marco Rubio and others – will have an advantage over Hillary Rodham Clinton, who relies on a command-and-control approach in which information is carefully doled out and any journalistic offenders are disciplined.” http://nyti.ms/15xDqOs
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