Read this or die, political junkie!

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Media commentary

Jeff Sallot

And so the battle for your time and attention begins.  The combatants are not just the politicians, but also reporters, editors, TV anchors, bloggers and other assorted old and new media types, myself included. (Stay with me on this.)

The competition is going to be doubly intense the coming weeks because we have a national election campaigns running here in Canada at the same times as the U.S. presidential campaign approaches its climax. 

Canadian TV news execs met with officials from the political parties the other day to work out schedules for the leaders’ debates that would not conflict with the TV presidential debates. They succeeded for the most part. But one of the Canadian debates is going to fall on the same night as the U.S. vice presidential debate. Political junkies are going to have to make a tough choice.  (“Honey, should we watch Harper and Dion tonight or Palin and Biden?”)

Judging by the weekend editions’  front pages, the two national dailies seem to have different takes on what their audiences want – or need – in terms of political coverage. The National Post’s front featured four photographs of Sarah Palin, including an intriguing shot of her with a bloody caribou she bagged somewhere in icy Alaska. The headline read: “Is Sarah Palin an enemy or hero of feminism?” She’s certainly the hero of Post photo editors.

Writing from deep in the American heartland, Conrad Black, the Post’s founder and former owner, had a full page inside to explain why the U.S. presidential contest is “the most important election in the world since the rise of Ronald Reagan in 1980.”

Over at The Globe and Mail, where I once worked, the weekend front was dominated by the Canadian election, as were the first ten pages of the news section. The Globe is also using  the print edition to direct political junkies to its election web site.  Editor Edward Greenspon says the web site will be able to “dig deeper” in political coverage than will the hard copy Globe.

Scalping?

A sidebar to Greenspon’s column promises that the web site will provide all the political news  you can handle with links to the latest “headlines elsewhere.” This “News from Elsewhere” is a nifty little device pioneered by some of the national Sunday papers in the U.K. The final editions of the Sunday papers would carry a summary of the major stories running in their competition. This used to be called scalping when it was done without crediting the competition, and it was frowned upon. It’s now a regular feature of cable news networks. TV talking heads will hold up the front pages of the morning papers, sometimes faxed or emailed in PDF format to the TV newsrooms from the papers themselves. 

And so there it was on the Globe’s politics web page Saturday morning, the links to stories  in the Sun papers, the Canwest papers, CBC, Canadian Press, the Halifax Chronicle Herald, and so on.

The bean counters in the business offices of major news organizations are going to love this. I can hear them now: “Why are we sending political reporters to Halifax to do stories when we can just link to the Chronicle Herald?” And the political reporters are going to hate it. Is this a new form of scalping? News gathering on the cheap.

One Stop Shopping

It seems to me  Globe editors need to clearly explain to readers their criteria for linking to these particular stories. Is the Globe validating the accuracy or newsworthiness of these stories? Probably not. But will they link to a juicy Frank Magazine-type rumour-laced report that their own reporters can’t nail down (maybe because it isn’t true) but is making the rounds at warp speed in the online world?

Editors  recognize the competition for your time and attention is intense, and they want their outlet to become one-stop shopping for consumers of political news.  One Globe website reader, using the screen name Bingo Bingo, posted this note: “One stop shopping? Sorry, I feed on media like a mouse, a little here, a little there, so I avoid lethal doses of poison.”

(Astute readers will note I have just scalped a delightful quote from the Globe website. You read it here first.)

Jeff Sallot, a former Globe and Mail political correspondent and Ottawa bureau chief, teaches journalism at Carleton University and is a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.