OffTheBus.net has had a HUGE scoop this past weekend. Read the NYT story copied below and Jay Rosen’s take.
Via the New York Times
The backstory of how Senator Barack Obama’s comments about small-town voters became news is getting almost as much attention in the blogosphere as the comments themselves.
Mayhill Fowler, a blogger for OffTheBus.net,a Web site published by Huffington Post and created by Arianna
Huffington and Jay Rosen, was the first to report Mr. Obama’s comments — that small-town voters bitter over their economic circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” as a way to explain their frustrations.
The comments created an instant sensation in the media and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton seized on them, hoping they would slow Mr. Obama’s momentum in the polls against her in Pennsylvania, which votes in 8 days. If Pennsylvania rejects Mr. Obama by a big margin, and voters in Indiana and North Carolina follow suit, the comment could be seen as the game-changer.
Ms. Fowler told me in an interview Sunday night that she was initially reluctant to write about what Mr. Obama had said because she actually supports him — which partly explains why she was at the fund-raiser in the first place and why there was a four-day delay between the event and the publication of her post. Ultimately, she said, she decided that if she didn’t write about it, she wouldn’t be worth her salt as a journalist.
Some Obama supporters in the blogosphere were up in arms at Ms. Fowler. They doubt that she really supports Mr. Obama, have called her a plant for Mrs. Clinton and suggested she was deceptive in getting into the fund-raiser.
The whole episode gives a revealing glimpse into yet even more ways in which the Internet is changing the coverage of politics. And Ms. Fowler says she is surprised that she is playing a role in this revolution.
"I’m 61," she said. "I can’t believe I would be one of the people who’s changing the world of media." But her experience raises questions about whether the roles, rules and expectations for journalists and bloggers are different. Can a person be both? Even Ms. Fowler acknowledged that "clearly everyone is going to be re-thinking how they handle this kind
of thing."
For one thing, some Internet enterprises, unlike the mainstream media, do allow their writers to actively support the people they cover: Ms. Fowler has contributed money to Mr. Obama (and other
candidates, including Mrs. Clinton).
Ms. Fowler, who graduated from Vassar in 1968 and had dabbled in writing, became a “citizen journalist” last summer when the Huffington Post started “OffTheBus.net,” a new venture that has now expanded to a network of about 1,800 unpaid writers and researchers. I wrote about O.T.B. in October, by which time editors at the Huffington Post had already identified Ms. Fowler as one of O.T.B.’s “emerging star correspondents.”
Ms. Fowler has spent a lot of time (and her own money) following the presidential campaign— and participating in it. She has maxed out at $2,300 to Mr. Obama, starting in increments last fall. She said she has also given money ($100) to Mrs. Clinton, because she is roughly Mrs. Clinton’s age and liked the idea of a woman president and she attended two Clinton fund-raisers with her sister, a devoted Clinton supporter. And she also gave $500 to Fred Thompson, of Tennessee, even though he is a Republican, because that’s where she is from and her family has been steeped in Tennessee politics since the 1790s (that’s not a typo).
As a supporter who had made donations, Ms. Fowler had been invited before to Obama fund-raisers — and written about them on O.T.B. After the Ohio and Texas primaries, she was back home in the Bay Area and heard that Mr. Obama would be holding four fund-raisers there on April 6. She had not been invited but asked a friend if she could go. She was put on the list for the last of four events, this one at a mansion in Pacific Heights.
There’s a bit of a brush fire in California about how Ms. Fowler got in, and Ms. Fowler is protecting the person who secured her a ticket. That person has since called her and said that fund-raisers are always off the record.
“This was never conveyed to me,” Ms. Fowler said. “I was invited to the event, I had written on fund-raisers in the past, why wouldn’t I this time?” She said the Obama campaign had never objected before to her having written about fund-raisers (though admittedly, nothing much of interest had happened). And the invitations said nothing about being closed to the press. Besides, she said, several guests brought people and children and who had not been invited.
“We had a fundamental misunderstanding of my priorities,” Ms. Fowler told me. “Mine were as a reporter, not as a supporter. They thought I would put the role of supporter first.”
Marc Cooper, who is the editorial coordinator of O.T.B., is writing on his own blog about the development of Ms. Fowler’s story and he acknowledged that the campaign did not want the event covered. “It was indeed a fund-raiser to which the press was not invited,” he wrote. “Or if you wish, it was closed to press. Therefore it wasn’t on or off the record. Off the record is when journalists consensually agree to witness or hear something on the condition they not report it.”
Still, he wrote, “Most if not all press was kept out of the room but Mayhill was invited in. She was under no obligation not to report. Obama was indeed more loose-lipped than usual. He should be more careful in his choice of words when he is staring into so many video cams, no matter who is holding them.”
Ms. Fowler said she held her digital recorder openly. The place was jammed with others using video cams and cell phone cameras. Among them, Ms. Fowler said, was a professor who was recording the event for his students. In fact, snippets of the speech have been posted on YouTube by others who were there.
Ms. Fowler started listening near where Mr. Obama was speaking but said it got so hot that she moved to the back, where she sat next to other people who were recording the event with professional equipment.
She also considered leaving because Mr. Obama was giving his stump speech. “I never went there dreaming there would be much of anything to write about,” she said. “I thought maybe I’d find something for background, I thought one sentence, maybe a dependent clause.”
She had just finished covering his bus trip across Pennsylvania — not on the bus itself but tagging along in a separate car — and was well-acquainted with his stump speech. So she recognized his comments about rural voters, which came in response to a question, as new. (The question was not, as has been reported, why he was lagging in the polls in Pennsylvania but what some of those in the room who were going to campaign for him in Pennsylvania might expect.)
Ms. Fowler said she found his response "professorial" and judgmental toward blue-collar voters and that even though she supports him, she was "taken aback" by them.
“I’m a religious person, and I grew up poor in a very wealthy family — sometimes we didn’t have enough to eat, but my larger family was rich,” she said. Her father was a hunter. “Immediately, the remarks just really bothered me. For the first time, I realized he is an elitist.”
She also knew they could hurt him, so at first, she didn’t tell anybody about them.
As it happened, Mr. Obama had made other “news” during his talk,
describing the kind of person he would pick for vice president and
revealing that he had been to Pakistan during college. Ms. Fowler
posted those comments the day after the fund-raiser.
Then she stewed for several days over whether to write about the
comments about small-town voters. “There are no standards of journalism on the Internet,” she said. “I’m always second-guessing myself. Is this the right thing to do? Am I being fair?”
She said she initially decided not to write about them. “I thought I wouldn’t put it out there, this really might damage his campaign,” she said. “I talked it over with my husband, and like many people, he didn’t see anything wrong with the remarks. He didn’t think it was newsworthy.”
Then she told her editor in New York that she had some interesting material but didn’t tell her exactly what it was. “Initially I resisted what she was telling me, which was that if you’re going to cover the campaign, you have to not be partial or your coverage isn’t worth as much as it could be,” she said.
The next step, she said, was realizing that her editor was right. As she flew east on Thursday to resume covering Mr. Obama, she said, the story just wrote itself in her head. While she said she usually spends four hours composing her posts, this one took
half an hour. Unlike her post about Mr. Obama’s vice presidential
musings, which she wrote as hard news, she wrote this one in the
ruminating style that has become her trademark. The important quotes were buried deep in the narrative, almost as if they were couched to soften the blow. She also said she thought posting on Friday would mean fewer people would see it.
Mr. Cooper, the editorial director, describes her style this way: “She employs a highly-personalized, reflective narrative style to her unconventional reporting — an approach that would be, indeed, non-grata, within the official campaign reporting bubble. It violates almost all of the conventions of traditional reporting (though not its ethical code) and that’s what makes it all so damn interesting.”
He added: “I, personally, would have written her piece much differently than the way she chose. It would have been less about me and more about Obama. But Mayhill has developed quite a loyal and appreciative audience and with her most recent work demonstrates that citizen journalism can do many, many things still inaccessible to the M.S.M.”
The post created an instant storm, garnering 5,000 hits immediately, more than 50,000 more in the next few hours and topping 100,000 by the end of the day. By then, Mr. Obama himself was talking about his comments and Mrs. Clinton was activating her entire campaign apparatus to try to exploit them.
The blogosphere swelled with outrage from Obama supporters. Ms. Fowler said Friday was the fourth-most memorable day of her life, after the birth of her two children and her wedding day.
Soon, the Obama Web posted a counter-description from another person who attended the fund-raiser (without the quotes). The writer gives a sympathetic explanation of Mr.
Obama’s comments and writes that Ms. Fowler had an agenda; Ms. Fowler said she had no agenda except to write it as she saw it.
Comments on dailykos.com became so furious that one poster suggested that readers let Ms. Fowler off the hook. “No,” someone else responded, “if we let her go, others will do it… We’ve got to show the ‘journalist’ that they can’t manufacture dissent. This isn’t about Obama, this could easily be a
story about Iraq or Iran. This is the type of disingenuous reporting that we have to stop. We need to make an example of her.”
Mr. Cooper continues to defend her and rejects any suggestion that she had strayed into a “gray area” of journalism.
“What’s gray is when a reporter engages in any level of deceit to get the story or violates a ground rule to which he or she promised to comply,” he writes. “Not the case with our reporter, thanks very much. She was known to the campaign as an OffTheBus reporter and they let her in as such and she worked the room as such and she recorded the event in the open as she sat with campaign staff,” He adds: “They probably let her in because they expected her to write unblemished pro-Obama copy. Or they don’t fully understand implications of internet age information. She herself was quite conflicted about writing something potentially harmful to Obama. But she correctly decided that the truth shall set ya free.”
He has been engaged in a dialogue with a poster named Bill Bradley, who then wrote: “Marc, they regarded her as a pro-Obama blogger. Not as a journalist or reporter or columnist perse. Bloggers are viewed as activists, not journalists. It’s why some
campaigns have blogger conference calls and press conference calls. The blogger calls are to pump up the base. The press calls are to do spin and answer arguably tough questions. She was admitted to the private San Francisco fund-raiser as an activist blogger and then functioned as a journalist. This is the gray area I’m talking about with regard to citizen journalism.”
Bloggers have certainly demonstrated that they can perform well as journalists. (Remember the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr.? Or Joshua Micah Marshall’s coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys?) But is it possible to straddle the line between reporter and supporter? Ms. Fowler said that despite the criticism, she is certain that she did the right thing. “I’m totally at peace with it,” she said.
By the way, if you’ve wondered why you haven’t heard Arianna Huffington weigh in on the subject, it turns out she’s on a cruise in the Pacific. She may not even know about the stir it has created. Consider the irony — her site gets perhaps its biggest scoop of the campaign and Ms. Huffington, a vigorous promoter of the site and a constant presence in the media, isn’t around to enjoy it.
Update:Ms Huffington sends the following: "I was indeed in Tahiti, but fully wired. Not only watching what was happening on our site and everything online about Mayhill’s post, but watching regularly updates on CNN International! There was no escaping this story, even in the South Pacific. As for my feelings about the political fallout, here is my post from this morning."
Also, Mr. Rosen, who founded OffTheBus with Ms. Huffington, has written his own account of the story and Ms. Fowler’s unchartered role as a citizen journalist.
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