President # 44 - Politico's diary

When I first started watching the publishing “cycle” for Politico44, the president and his family were still in Europe. The page seemed to be filled with little stories about Paris, the family running around the Eiffel tower, and other such magazine-type content. I did a screen shot of the content, fully intending to update that daily for a few days and watch the changes.

The plan was to do a screen shot daily and compare, but with my work schedule that didn't happen.

Honestly I thought it looked like a PR site for the administration. Maybe like adayinthelifeof.potus.org. It seemed to have very little opinion from the "other side." It mentioned Newt Gingrich a few times, but mostly in the context of him taking down the conservatives. I wasn't too impressed with the balance.

The whole thing reminded me somewhat of some of the media from the Camelot days of the Kennedys in 1960. I was very young lad then, but I remember it well. The media was all caught up in the fairy tale of JFK, Jackie (especially Jackie), John-John and Caroline.

See the screen shot of that first look (when the family was in Paris) on the left.

Fast forward to Thursday, June 11. I am glad I did. I was a lot more impressed with the site from a balance point of view.

I liked the news links. This issue had more contrarian reports - much more than I thought it would have, as the first issue I looked at had seemed so pro-administration.

A sample: The Cantor - POTUS looking like Putin by Alexander Burns. The article quoted minority whip House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) in a strong statement about the president’s handling of the auto industry bailout policy.

Another article: Common sense in the age of Obama RealClearPolitics by Mark Salter. This was a good link to an article by the former chief of staff of Senator John McCain on how the spending record of the present administration and some of the “pay-as-you-go” words in recent speeches by the president don’t really match up that well.

There were a number of video links with good-looking open screens, promising a news-clip-on-demand type of service. The problems came when two of the clips I tried to watch said “the video you are trying to watch is not available” (after showing the commercial pre-roll, which certainly WAS available)!

The day’s news played a good bit on the note the president offered to write (and did write) for a young lady taken out of school by her parents to come to the Green Bay town hall meeting. I first read about it on the white board, and then, when I saw it on a video clip, had to see what it looked like in “real life.” I doubt if that student will entrust it to her teacher. It might be worth more in the safety deposit box at a bank. Not sure it would have worked for me in my day, though. I had a chemistry teacher who still would not have excused my absence!

There was another photo clip: FBI director visits White House, by Amie Parnes: "Spotted at the W.H. around 1 p.m.: FBI Director Robert Mueller. Was he meeting with someone about the Holocaust Museum shooting?"

It was sort of a High School Yearbook ploy of 'what if'. My worries here would be that someone might take that fun little riddle and interpret it as news and out it goes to the world! Politico said it!

One thing was that was a bit annoying was the fact that the still shots looked a lot like the video shots and they were mixed around on the page. That made it a bit hard to tell at a glance what was video and what was simply an enhanced story line.

One thing I do like about the pics though is the fact that the pic was really the lede and the lede was the story. It was very brief, punchy, and web-scannable.

It was for-the-web righting for sure. Content was played in several buckets (like the school-excuse-note). I saw it appear in three places with different permutations – all short, snappy and appealing. That is true web writing.

The daily calendar, which looks like an Outlook calendar, is very appealing. Even I was tempted to look across days and see just how full his calendar really was. (I wanted to see if he had more meetings than I did at work). Some days he won - some days I won. (JK).

It WAS tempting, though, to try and find an open slot and schedule myself in. I can see it now: 12:30-1:30, Friday, June 12. Subject: Lunch in G-town. Location: TBD.

As far as a deconstruction goes, from my experience doing news on the net with a newspaper, I'd say they have a weekday staff of about 5 for this page.

One probably scans all news reports on the web, the wire services and lots of other sources and then gets the updates (links, wire reports, press releases) into the central editing mill. There is most likely one textual production person - also an editor. The text content is not toooo heavy, but this writer(s) seems to be a VERY good writer for the web because they write in content batches - short and punchy - and bulletin-style.

I would imagine there is another person gathering video content constantly and doing editing to get the files into the size they need. I would guess that person also handles the optimization of the still photos.

Add an overall editor and you have a good crew. That editor may also be the one gathering all the daily calendar-type info from whatever source they have and making sure it is current and accurate (but most likely has a helper who does both admin and fact-checking).

Take this all to a 24/7 coverage with very light crew in the late evenings to wee hours of morning and a larger crew on the weekends and you have a staff of about 10.

The site in many ways plays like an aggregator site with little original content, mostly links, short briefs and bulletins. That keeps the staff load lighter and limits the depth they can go after. But for an aggregator site, it is pretty thorough.

An interesting site, even if not one for deeper thinkers.

(Update Saturday, June 13, 2009).

Thanks for bearing with me on the earlier version. Written in haste and unedited, it was not easy reading. Hopefully my work schedule will slow down this week.