“Think drama is just for your girlfriends? Think again — because Election ‘08 just got very dramatic!”
So wrote College junior and DP staffer Sara Himeles on Seventeen.com’s Electionista blog in a late September post, referring to John McCain’s controversial announcement to postpone the first presidential debate. Himeles co-founded the blog, which aims to educate teenage girls about the election, with recent McGill University graduate Liz Perle while the two were interning at the magazine this past summer.
Himeles is just one of a number of Penn students who have turned to blogging as an outlet for political expression in an election year that has both energized and mobilized the college-aged demographic.
Prior to her internship at Seventeen, Himeles worked for the Barack Obama campaign, helping to manage the Democratic candidate’s presence on social networks like Facebook and MySpace. After realizing that Seventeen’s readers had a genuine interest in the election despite their young age, she pitched the idea of a non-partisan political blog to the senior editor of the magazine’s Web site, Himeles said. The blog was up and running by early August and has since acquired a devoted readership.
“I honestly believe that this is a unique resource,” she said. “There’s no other way that teens can get information on the election that caters to their interests and speaks in their language.” Himeles and a team of five other former interns have continued to write during the school year, with posts ranging from Q&A with election experts — sometimes on topics as basic as “What’s the difference between a Republican and a Democrat?”— to profiles of young “electionistas,” the blog’s catchy term for high school or college-aged girls with political opinions.
Since most readers are under the age of 18 and therefore cannot cast a ballot, Electionista hosts a poll every Monday asking them whom they would like to be president. Himeles believes that it’s important for young women to be able to chat about the election just as easily as they do about clothes, celebrity gossip and the latest trends. To this end, she said, the blog “takes an event on the campaign trail and figures out how to distill it to its basic message and explain it in the Seventeen voice,” which she describes as conversational and fun. That’s why a post she wrote early last month warned readers, “At Seventeen, we love to talk about lipstick. But when the latest debate on the campaign trail has to do with lipstick instead of health care or the economy, some of us start to get a little concerned!”
Other students have also found ways to make their political voices heard on well-established Web sites. College junior and former Spin blogger Michael Tate is a contributor to techPresident, a blog that analyzes the role of technology in the election, and like Himeles, he got his start in a campaign office. While working as director of online communications for Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo during his bid for the Republican nomination, Tate was in touch with techPresident as staff members covered the candidate’s technology strategies. After the congressman dropped out of the presidential race last December, the blog invited Tate to join their team.
“I try to write about emerging digital technology and how it will impact political communication,” he said. “That’s pretty much my forte.” His recent posts have touched on Obama’s iPhone application, McCain’s YouTube videos and Hillary Clinton’s mass text messages. The blog’s audience includes political consultants and campaign officials from both sides of the political spectrum. “It’s a trade journal for politics and technology,” he said. “It’s not Perez Hilton.”
But regardless of their content, Tate believes that blogs are the “fastest, quickest and easiest way to communicate to large numbers of people,” in part thanks to their ability to link instantly to related sites and other sources of information. That said, he is not convinced that blogs have revolutionized political communication just yet. “It’s still an old-media election,” he said. “Blogs aren’t having the impact that bloggers think they are. There’s a huge part of the electorate that’s still not connected — that’s still going to ABC, CNN and NBC for their political news.”
While some of our parents and grandparents may not be logging on to The Huffington Post or Daily Kos for their election news, it is hard to deny that blogging is affecting the world of politics and political media. According to Mike Madden, C’98, the Washington correspondent for online magazine Salon, blogs have facilitated research about the opposition for politicians and the party faithful by disseminating negative information about candidates before it ever appears in the mainstream media.
What’s more, he said, blogs are contributing to an increasingly fast-paced news cycle because they constantly feed readers the latest tidbits of information and can be accessed anytime and anywhere. As a result, pieces of news may get tossed out into the public domain before going through careful analysis or being linked to a broader narrative, processes that allow professional journalists to put news into perspective.
For Dick Polman, “writer in residence” and faculty member at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at Penn, it was this fast pace that attracted him to the blogosphere after decades of working in print journalism. In early 2006, Polman decided to start a blog for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he had spent many years as a political writer. He said his blog, called Dick Polman’s American Debate, gave him a way to reach a broader audience, including a younger generation that is less likely to pick up the morning paper.
Polman, who teaches courses on political writing and blogging, said he typically spends several hours writing his daily post after doing background research and reporting the night before. The instantaneous nature of the process can be satisfying. “It used to be you write something and you see it in print the next day,” he said. “Now you can write something and see it online within minutes, and if it’s something you’re happy with… that gives you the buzz to keep doing it.”
In a world where readers tend to seek news that will validate their own rules, Polman said he aims to reach both liberals and conservatives by writing in a provocative style that has grown more outspoken and irreverent over the years. “The new media is so vast that you can customize your reading just to conform to your opinions,” he said. “It’s just like an iPod. You can customize your music, and now you can customize your political information.”
For voters seeking such customized news — or at least their preferred candidate’s latest poll numbers — blogs create online communities based on shared beliefs. The Penn Democrats, for example, have a blog where members of the campus organization express their political opinions, comment on election news and educate their fellow students on the key issues. According to College junior Amelia Bailey, communications director for Penn Democrats, the blog has seen a significant uptick in interest from the student body this fall, garnering an average of 300 hits per day. “Blogs are especially important among students, in the same way that editorials in student newspapers are,” she said. “An opinion coming from a peer seems much more legitimate and is much more likely to persuade a reader.”
Blogger Brett Thalmann, W’07, said students can play an important role in encouraging political engagement among their peers through their posts. In April 2007, after completing his term as chair of the Undergraduate Assembly, he started Progressive Dispatches, a liberal blog whose self-professed mantra is “propping up Penn’s left-wing one post at a time.” Though Progressive Dispatches discusses U.S. politics and the presidential race, the Toronto native had previously honed his writing skills with Canadian Liberal at Penn, a blog about politics north of the border. Because of his leadership role in Penn’s student government, Thalmann was uniquely positioned to relate national issues back to campus life, which he said is the best way college-aged bloggers can influence their readership.
For colleges with alumni who are making headlines in the election, the task of bringing national politics to a campus level becomes easier. The Bwog, the general interest blog of Columbia University’s undergraduate magazine, posts anytime Barack Obama or Megan McCain, both graduates of the university, make mention of their alma mater, according to Bwog editor Juli Weiner.
Weiner, who interned at The Huffington Post this past summer and is currently working for Wonkette in addition to editing the Bwog, said there is never a shortage of writing opportunities when it comes to the blogosphere. In a time of uncertainty for print newspapers and magazines, students who want to find a niche in the world of opinion journalism are more likely to meet success on the Internet. “Magazines are folding [but] anyone can start a blog,” she said.
But the fact that the blogosphere is rife with opinion may also be leading to increased political polarization, according to Polman. He said that bloggers, whose musings can become fodder for public chatter within minutes, are making it more difficult than ever before for politicians to run campaigns. “Everything is recorded and immediately commented on,” Polman said. And it isn’t hard to cite examples — just recall last week’s hubbub surrounding “Joe the Plumber,” whose name became ubiquitous across news media after the third presidential debate. In fact, the plumber has since been mentioned on Electionista, techPresident, Dick Polman’s American Debate and the Penn Democrats blog.
Given the interactive nature of online journalism, a blog can become an outlet for writers and readers alike. Responses to posts often become part of lively dialogues fostered by the sense of extreme democracy in the blogosphere. Himeles said that some of her posts on Electionista receive up to 80 or 90 reader comments, especially if the topic is controversial. In particular, her teenage audience responds vigorously to anything she writes about vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, a public figure who she said has captured their interest, albeit not necessarily out of respect or admiration. “The comments on the blog are by far the most rewarding part of the whole thing,” Himeles said. “These girls are so passionate.”
With additional reporting by Amaris Cuchanski
