Online Right

These discussions about what an online right should look like seems to miss several points. There are distinct problems, and they need to be handled seperately. Some of these problems need to be solved organically, some will require time, but some can be solved somewhat mechanically.

One of the things that we need to solve immediately and may be susceptible to a mechanical solution is the crisis of information. The crisis of information is that righty information outlets are having incrementally less influence on the news cycle than lefty ones. The chart is from this WSJ story about the rise of the lefty blogs and specifically Huffington Post vis-a-vis Drudge. TPM, Chris Cillizza, Howard Kurtz, Halperin and others have been talking about this also.

On the list above, Townhall, Michelle Malkin, Newsbusters, and Redstate were the only sites to demonstrate triple-digit growth during the last election period, and only Redstate's and Newsbusters' was truly explosive. (full disclosure: I am a front-page contributor to both of those)

But I don't want to focus on traffic, but rather a related question: who drives the news cycle? This used to be Drudge and still is to a great degree. But any experience watching this electoral cycle will tell you that TPM and Huffington Post are essential in setting narratives and forcing campaigns and other political actors to respond to specific reported and sourced information and distributing it quickly. With that in mind, let's look at something Mark Tapscott said:

But I want to offer a third essential element in addition to punditry and activism. The RightRoots must make a top priority of equiping vastly more of our sites with the reportorial and investigative skills required to dig up and present credible exposes, fact-based analyses and concrete news stories.

In short, we've complained about liberal media bias for decades, but now that the mainstream media is steadily being displaced by online media, many of us need to become ..... journalists, or capable of doing the online analogy of traditional journalism, particularly in its investigative phase.

I would state this slightly differently. Stories are started online with HuffPo and TPM. They are completed on TV and in the newspapers. We are playing in no part of that process. One of the reasons for that is that there is no reliable place to go for fact-based conservative perspective.

This is something that we could do now. There are enough talented reporters to start training and mentorship programs for more. These people could play in the news cycle. This would not necessarily require donors to dump money on "bloggers". Rather the people would be established journalists with records.

Other parts of rebuilding the right as a coherent ideological and electoral force will depend on other things (like a coherent ideological framework linked to coherent policies). But this we can do relatively quickly and start demonstrating immediate results by attacking the terrible policies of a Democratic Congress and, potentially, a Democratic White House.

Following up on the thoughtful posts by Patrick Ruffini (here and here) and John Hawkins (and by James Joyner, Dan Riehl, Melissa Clouthier and Rick Moran), I think there are a few important points to make about this project of creating online infrastructure.  I don't specifically disagree with Patrick Ruffini, but I do think he's omitting some important points.

• Organism: A good netroots movement is not a product of financial support.   While money can help elevate important voices, the Right does not lack a general political "noise machine".   We don't need to subsidize the Chatterati.  That is exactly the opposite of organic and grassroots.
• Resources: Nevertheless, infrastructure is important, and Patrick Ruffini is right that we genuinely do have some human resource problems.  For years, this did not seem terribly important.  The offline infastructure really was sufficient.  But in 2006, a political tipping point arrived.  Suddenly, the Left's ability to message, mobilize and fundraise online became apparent and important.  In 2008, the impact of that online infrastructure has become overwhelming.  In Washington, DC, in the media and on the ground. the Left has learned how to turn an online swarm into offline results.

• Mission: And yet, what the Right really needs is not to have bloggers get comfortable with activism.  While we do have human resource problems, we can't improve the game by yelling louder.  The people who read blogs are not awaiting a blogger's call to action.  That organic energy comes from a unifying grievance and a common mission.

Don't put the cart before the horse.  The Leftosphere is not effective because they can fundraise and mobilize activists.  They are effective because they can communicate and organize people around a message.  Fundraising and activism is a product of communication and organization.

If we have the right agenda, the money and activism will happen on their own; without the right agenda, activist bloggers won't help.

It's very important to understand what the Left has been doing in recent years.  They haven't been building websites.  They have been building a Movement.

Dan RIehl argues that  "the notion that the Left's Netroots grew up organically is a bit of a myth. As I pointed out as far back as July 2006, there was big money and political professionals behind getting that really going."

He's a little bit right and wrong here.  The Left did have both organic and cultivated components. 

• The organic period (1998-2003) included the emergence of Moveon.org, Daily Kos, Atrios, MyDD and other important Left-of-Center voices (Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Kevin Drum).
• The cultivated period (2003-current) included the emergence of important infrastructure (Center for American Progress, Media Matters), as well as the integration of progressive institutions with the netroots (American Prospect, Washington Monthly, Labor Unions, etc)

Both the organic and cultivated elements were necessary to make the other really effective.  A coordinating tool (Center for American Progress/Media Matters) isn't effective without a crowd to coordinate (Kos, MyDD, Atrios).  A crowd isn't really effective without coherent, organizing ideas and information around which they can mobilize.

The Right has the crowd (although that can be improved).  We're missing the coordinating mechanisms.  But even the crowd + coordination won't work unless there is a genuinely relevant organizing agenda; ideas that touch a nerve and capture the imagination.  There is a role here for better infrastructure to be built now, but it is first about improved information delivery, story-telling and organizing, not about fundraising and mobilizing.

Without the organizing agenda, the parts are...just parts.  There is no fuel.

It's not a matter of the Right not having the money.  It's a matter of the Right not having a mission.  The political entrepreneurialism that we've seen on the Left will emerge on the Right when the Right begins to coalesce around an agenda.

UPDATE

Red State's Erick Erickson offers some important points, as well.

In the regular debate about about how the right can catch up online, several points are often missed. The first is that the left has developed a movement based on the interconnectedness of people inside the movement. People get recruited, energized, and leveraged. This may or may not be as much a function of larger demographic and political trends, as it has something to do with the netroots specifically.

At the same time, the right has often been better at campaign mechanics, especially in recent years. Our assumption seems to be that if we get enough people to go and vote in this country -- which we still believe is just right of center -- then we can win. If McCain wins, it will probably be because his ideas are basically in line with a just-right-of-center country, while Obama's may not be.

In recent years, our political-technological innovations have focused on turning out normal people at unbelievable levels. In that context, I want to highlight something from Jose Antonio Vargas hints at this in his piece on Cyrus Krohn and the RNC:

[...] Then-Rep. Bobby Jindal was an attractive candidate, Krohn says, and it was projected to be a tight race. For 3 1/2 months, using online micro-targeting and data-matching, he identified a set of voters and turned them out to the polls.

Statewide turnout for the Louisiana race was 46 percent. Of those voters who interacted with Krohn's online targeting -- he won't say how much of the total vote -- 76 percent voted, he claims. Krohn says he's not suggesting that the RNC is responsible for Jindal's win. What it does suggest, however, is that the model could have significant impact on voter turnout, he adds.

Technology should lower the costs of things that campaigns already do, and those lowered costs should allow new ideas and techniques. The 72-hour program massively increased the efficiency of the GOP's GOTV efforts, at the same time that the RNC and Bush-Cheney got better at recruiting more volunteers to do those things.

The Louisiana story makes clear that we likely still have significant advantages here. Our GOTV is almost certainly tremendously more efficient, helped by the things that Cyrus is working on, existing technologies like 72-hour, and non-electoral technology developments. These efficiencies will allow us to stretch our precious GOTV dollars and volunteer time by deploying them where they make the most incremental difference in actually delivering the next vote.

If this ends up being a close election, or a very close election, it is going to come down to electoral technology. Maybe it will be ACORN crashing the rolls and delivering illegal voters. Maybe it will be Cyrus massively increasing turnout and optimizing our GOTV through what he is doing. Maybe it will be just that they recruit and register and vote more people than we do, or vice versa. But my hunch is that if we win a nail-biter, what Cyrus is doing will deserve a big chunk of the credit.

I don't want to downplay what the left is doing at all. We clearly are not competing with them in this space. Social media should give us more opportunities to communicate with voters and future voters alike. And we should be able to exploit the efficiencies and new modes of communication to better organize people.

But in some places, we are doing very, very well. And Jose's story on Cyrus should make that clear.

A quick note on two things the online Right is doing now:

1. ReadWriteWeb points out that Rep. Randy Kuhl "is soliciting ideas for bills until July 18th. Kuhl will then choose his favorite 5 submissions and users will vote for the best, and the winning idea will be introduced on the floor of the US House of Representatives."   Rep. Kuhl has more information here and ideas can be submitted here.

It's nice to see a Republican doing something collaborative.  It could be more sophisticated, though.  For one thing, Rep. Kuhl should have gone directly to blogs to launch and advance this project.  He should make the submission process a bit more open (if not so open that you merely invite trolls).  He should focus it on agenda items that have a significant chance of both passing and moving the ideological ball forward (e.g., earmarks, transparency, etc). 

2. The RNC has launched a new site, Meet Barack Obama, where they'll basically be posting research and linking to their videos and microsites.   You can also participate in a poll about Barack Obama.  And donate to the RNC, of course. 

To be honest, I'm not really a fan of microsites.  They're usually pretty, rather than genuinely well-designed for infomation delivery; and while they might grab attention (and email addresses) in the very, very short term, they tend to be forgotten quickly.  They are "check the box" items, nice looking, but not terribly effective for communication.

That actually gets to a larger issue.  Large, bureaucratic organizations - business, political, campaign, or advocacy - generally are not very good at online communication for a few reasons. 

• Bureaucratic inertia prevents organizations from acting quickly - or at all - far too often. 
• Lawyers are now our front-line communicators.  Risk aversion leads organizations to check communication through the legal department before sending it out, leading to communication that sounds good to...lawyers.  Lawyers are paid to eliminate legal risk, not to communicate information effectively.
• Perverse incentives: The incentives of agents within organizations often does not align with the organization's larger goals.   The bigger the organization, the more potential perverse incentives exist.   That series of hurdles prevents a lot of clever ideas from seeing the light of day.

Rather than devoting so many resources to jumping through all of those hurdles, I think the Right is probably better served by outsourcing this kind of messaging to outlets who have a comparative advantage in messaging. 

[Promoted - this is written by an important ally on the Right who would prefer pseudonimity for now.  He makes a number of extremely important points - Jon Henke]

Four thoughts on how the GOP can renew itself online:

1.      Be motivated. People primarily point to the Left’s metrics of raising more money online, and generating bigger crowds for their issues, as the reason why they are ahead vs. The Right.  This is 1/2 of the problem.  It chiefly boils down to enthusiasm for engagement.  The GOP can be motivated if they once again return to their roots and adopt a message that resonates with the American People.  That message could very well be the Platform of the American People.  Remember, Moveon.org started because the left was angry over impeachment and then it waned and caught second wind after the Iraq War.  If we are motivated, money will be raised online to fight good causes and good causes excite people.

2.      Relocate & stop hiring partisan vendors.  Another 1/4 of the problem is a combination of bad technology, bad user experience and not being smart about looking ahead. Republicans should absolutely hire someone whose sole job it is to study and monitor the Online Left and study Moveon.org, the Huffington Post, DailyKos and BarackObama.com.   Republicans need good advice and good technology from the private sector.  Every Republican ought to learn what is happening in Silicon Valley and stop looking to Washington-based web consultants for the answer.  If Republicans are serious about winning back the web, they ought to look to Silicon Valley to learn from the private sector.

3.      Have a Long Term Approach to solving this big problem.  The RNC got #2 (above) right when they hired Cyrus Krohn, a Silicon Valley executive, to run the GOP’s site.  But, Republican political internet operatives, by nature, operate from one campaign to the next.  As bright as Cyrus is, he will be limited in executing his vision because of the rules of the RNC, which limit the RNC’s hiring contracts to no more than two years (the term of a chairman).  If the RNC was smart, they would give Cyrus (or someone in his capacity) a 5 year contract.  The GOP needs a long term Marshall Plan–like solution to solving the Digital Divide; an approach that lasts longer than just the next election cycle. That is the last ¼ of the problem.

4.      Historical trend. Add the above three together with simply looking at history.  Historically, the party out of power clings to the media of the day to try to balance that power deficit. The GOP clung to talk radio during the Clinton years, and the Left clung to the Internet during the Bush years.  So part of this is somewhat historical.  Its possible that a true catch up on the Internet will likely only materialize if the GOP completely bottoms out, which, if the last three special elections are any indication, may be sooner than we think.

In summary, here is a mathematical formula for where we are at today: NO ISSUES + BAD CONSULTANTS + MYOPTIC VISION + HISTORY = GOP NET DISASTER.

Over the past week, I've noticed folks having many takes on why the right has not been able to match what the left has created online. There have been many good arguments for the cause of that failure, but I think I've noticed the biggest one that has yet to be discussed.

For years those on the left have bemoaned the fact that conservative talk radio has overtaken the airwaves and helped launch many successful endeavors. They tried at first to create their own talk radio movement, but that flat out collapsed. Their next move was to suggest the bringing back of the archaic 'fairness doctrine'. This also failed, for now.

With no other place to go, hard driven liberal activists went to the only place they really could, online. It was here that they were able to take advantage of the speed of the internet and it's ability to build online communities. They created open transparent web sites where activists were able to be localized, communicate, exchange ideas, and raise money for causes they felt strong about. The result of  which is now a technologically savy online liberal machine that is able to pull large numbers of individuals and money to any cause in a matter of hours or days. It's quite a formidable enterprise, and one that should not be underestimated by Republicans focusing on the 'old way' of doing things.

Now it's the conservatives who bemoan the fact that we are the ones being left behind on the net.  We're all sitting here now trying to figure out how we can build something similar to counter the online liberal machine. It's my belief, that we have the opportunity to build something to rival our friends on the left, in fact I think we even have an advantage that they never had, and that is the power of talk radio.

I know it's simple to say that, but sometimes the answer to the hardest problem is just  a simple answer that's right in front of your face. Talk radio has been right in our face for years, and it's really about time that someone finds a way to take advantage of what we have in it.

When people tell me that the left is kicking our ass online, I've always replied that we were really kicking their ass on the air waves and that if we wanted our own Moveon.org style site, we could have one if talk radio just got behind it. Nothing like that has happened though, and people still just talk about "where's our Moveon?"

For conservatives online, our inability to link with talk radio is comparable to the US Navy heading out to battle without it's feared aircraft carrier battle groups. The Navy's strength and power is primarily built around those battle groups, and they couldn't expect to take the fight to our enemies without them.  Conservatives similarily have this in talk radio, yet in no real sufficient way is talk radio's true power being harnessed here on the internet.

Conservative talk radio is our version of the aircraft carrier. Much of our conservative strength is built around it and we use it to project our influence. The liberals wisely fear it's lethal power, yet when it comes to the battle online, we leave them tied up back in the harbor.

To this day, historians debate on what would have happened if the American aircraft carriers weren't at sea during the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. It would have been truly catastrophic and left both Hawaii and the west coast almost defenseless. If conservatives were to lose talk radio one day, where would conservatism be?

We have to remember folks, that a big goal of the netroots was to create something to counter our talk radio. If they succeed in sending more liberal Democrats to the House, Senate, and even the White House, they just might wind up sinking talk radio for good by bringing back the Fairness Doctrine.

Yes, it may sound extreme, but when did that ever stop the left?

It's my belief that at some point in time, maybe when circumstances demand so, someone or some group will figure out how to work with the vast talk radio platform and create an online organization that will rival and one day surpass what the left has built online.

When will that be? I don't know, but I hope it's sooner, rathan than later. It's time to bring the massive firepower of talk radio and our best online minds together now before it's too late.

That's just my two cents. 

Lane is the founder of the former Blogs For Fred Thompson and currently runs Blogs For John McCain.

Why does the Right side of the blogoshere have less traffic, a smaller audience, than the Left side of the blogosphere?   Chris Bowers, writing at MyDD and Open Left, has addressed the question previously.  While I don't agree with all of his analysis, he makes very compelling points.  A substantial part of this disparity is attributable to simple cyclical dynamics.  While the Right has been in power, defending the status quo, the Left has been storming the castle. 

Storming the castle is much more fun.

There are other contributing factors as well.  Perhaps Progressive demographics and the "creative class" divide play a part; the Left has certainly invested a lot more in building smart, strategic online infrastructure.

But I wonder if there's not another factor - an artifact of the 1990s - that is being overlooked.  It's easy to forget that the Right was generally considered to be ahead on the internet until about 2003.   Opposition to the Clinton administration resulted in a number of popular websites, such as Newsmax, WorldNetDaily, Free Republic and Towhall.   And while it is ideologically opaque now, the Drudge Report was generally thought to be right-of-center at the time. 

For quite some time, those sites dominated the political landscape.  But, with the exception of Townhall, they never really evolved.  While left of center magazines, online media outlets, advocacy organizations and and think tanks embraced the new media, the legacy Rightospere remained resolutely devoted to its Web 1.0 model.

It wasn't until 2003, when the Progressive blogs really found their voice over unifying grievances like the Iraq war, specific political narratives, and clear movement leaders like Howard Dean.  But when the 2004 election ended, the online Left continued to grow.   And why not?  After all, like the Right in the 1990s, they had  "an axe to grind, and plenty of fury to turn the wheel."

Today, the Leftosphere is the dominant public channel for political communication for the onine Left...but is that also true of the Rightosphere?  I'm not sure.  Take a look at the following Alexa chart of traffic to various legacy Rightosphere sites compared against Daily Kos.  

While Alexa is far from a perfect measurement, this certainly suggests the legacy Rightosphere is, at least, competitive.   But the top right-of-center blogs do not do so well.

Based on a few conversations I've had with people who have looked into online consumption patterns on the Right, I think it's very possible that the online Right has two distinct cultures: one that evolved into the new media culture, and one that never made the transition out of the 1990's internet culture.

• The Web 2.0 Right has evolved into the new media age.   They read blogs routinely, and may also use social media, social networking and bookmarking tools.  They are comfortable with, even participants in, the social, collaborative media.
• The Web 1.0 Right, however, is still operating in a one-way world - an online news media that does not really encourage dynamic online activism, collaboration or engagement with the news.  This audience is getting some news...and that's it.  The engagement process ends there.

That is only a hypothesis, at this point and I would be interested in seeing more data on internet consumption patterns on the Right.   If that's the case, though, we ought to start thinking about how we bring the Web 1.0 Right into a more dynamic, collaborative Web 2.0 Rightosphere.