Lead Pipes vs. Leaky Pipes
by Patrick Ruffini :: August 5th, 2007 1:46 amThe netroots is reveling in Chicago, and the natural reaction is to ask, “Where’s our YearlyKos?”
It’s a good question, but ultimately a short-sighted one from an historical perspective. Go back and re-read the TNR piece on the netroots from May. Especially this part:
The Democratic leadership and the liberal intelligentsia seemed pathetic and exhausted, wedded to musty ideals of bipartisanship and decorousness. Meanwhile, what the netroots saw in the Republican Party, they largely admired. They saw a genuine mass movement built up over several decades. They saw a powerful message machine. And they saw a political elite bound together with ironclad party discipline.
This, they decided, is what the Democratic Party needed. And, when they saw that the party leadership was incapable of creating it, they decided to do it themselves. “We are at the beginning of a comprehensive reformation of the Democratic Party,” write Moulitsas and Armstrong.
Who is jealous of who here? YearlyKos, and also the Take Back America Conference, were almost certainly borne of the question “Where is our CPAC?” Some of those covering this act as though the idea of a conference with thousands of grassroots activists and Presidential candidates falling all over themselves to speak is totally unheard of on the right. Um, no. The netroots was built on Xeroxing the Goldwater-Reagan Revolution in the Republican Party. Almost always, it was conservatives who were the initial innovators.
When covering the netroots vs. the rightroots, reporters look at things through a particular frame that by definition excludes the vast majority of grassroots activity on the right. For something to be newsworthy in this space, it must be blog-based, it must have emerged in the last five years, and it must be focused on elections over legislative or policy outcomes.
The problem with this angle is that most of the conservative institutions online emerged in the late Clinton Administration or immediately after 9/11. At their peak, they were larger than Daily Kos, and arguably some still are. And they rarely receive any scrutiny because they don’t fit the frame. From a macro movement-building perspective, the left catching us to us is being covered as a need for us to catch up with something the left has invented anew.
And despite how unfair that narrative is, there’s something to it. The conservative analog to YearlyKos is 30 years old. The 800lb. gorillas of the conservative Web initially went online in the 1995-97 timeframe. And many have failed to innovate. They are still Web 1.0, where the Left jumped directly into Web 2.0 in the Bush years. Consider:
- The Drudge Report is probably the most popular political Web site, bar none. Matt Drudge sets the tone of MSM coverage. And yet Drudge has made clear he disdains blogs. The site looks the same as it did in 1997 (can’t argue with success, I suppose). There is no interactivity on Drudge. You go there, read, refresh, and that’s it.
- At its height, Free Republic was the Daily Kos of the right. In fact, I think the stratospheric, un-blog-like traffic numbers of Kos can only be explained by Kos finally filling the Free Republic void on the Left. Who could forget shenanigans like sabotaging Gore campaign conference calls with toilets flushing in the background, or the cries of “Get out of Cheney’s house!” Freepers were able to move action virtually anywhere in America. If Daily Kos is the angry left, Free Republic was the angry right — and we were hooked.
But Free Republic simply could not succeed in the world of the blogosphere, social media, and Web 2.0. The founders made the decision that they were going to hoard as much traffic on their servers as possible, by posting full-text articles (that eventually got them slapped with high-profile lawsuits from WaPo and the LAT). Early on, links to blogs were verboten. If you expressed your own opinion when starting a thread, that was a “vanity” and it was frowned upon. And fundraising for candidates was strictly forbidden, except for those pet causes approved by Jim Robinson. Their culture was very anti-blog and anti-original content.
Today, Free Republic increasingly finds itself marginalized. If you support Rudy Giuliani, who still has a decent shot at being our nominee, you’ve probably been purged. Free Republic’s walled garden approach worked in the days before blogs and broadband, but they actively resisted changing with the times. What we now have is a resource with more unique eyeballs than Kos but one that won’t work with others or push the envelope technologically. What a waste. Imagine how the history of the rightroots could have been different if Free Republic wasn’t still stuck in 1996?
What lessons did our activists learn from this? Freepers, who were our best online activists, never learned how to swarm to other sites, to take different kinds of actions, and to raise money for conservative candidates.
- Finally, let’s look at the center-right blogosphere. Its watershed moments were 9/11 and CBS memogate. That’s reflected in our strongest core competencies — warblogging and acting as media watchdogs.
Unfortunately, that poses structural challenges that has starved the center-right of tech-savvy volunteers. Of all the issues to choose to make an impact on, the $400 billion-a-year defense apparatus is probably the most impenetrable. (Personally, I would hope that the Pentagon is not reading the blogs to decide their battleplan.) So on the war, we are pretty much limited to punditry, with the obvious exceptions of the milbloggers in the field.
And the media focus also fits the frame of conservative bloggers as pundits rather than activists. If we act as pseudo-journalists and commentators, it stands to reason that we’d think actually getting involved on a campaign is dirty business.
My co-blogger Hugh Hewitt refers to the “lead pipes” of the left-wing blogosphere that are slowly but surely contaminating the groundwater in the Democratic Party. But if their pipes are dirty, ours are leaky and badly in need of an overhaul. (At least if one wants to do more than just pass along positive information about the war.)
It would be one thing if we didn’t have any of these institutions, and could start from scratch just as the netroots did. My fear is that we have a bunch of institutions that still function somewhat well, but are long past their prime. With that, there is the danger we will slowly die without knowing it, as our techniques gradually lose effectiveness year after year. Just like newspaper circulation numbers. And there are a number of people on the right who are still complacent about this.
It seems to me that the numbers are there to do something great around the 2008 elections, and that all we need to do is effectively tap into the conservative blogosphere. I looked at N.Z. Bear’s traffic stats for political blogs with over 20,000 visits a day. And the visitor gap between left and right was lower than I could remember in some time: 1.2 million to 870,000 for the left (half of the left’s total was Kos).
Looking beyond the blogosphere, a place the MSM isn’t as familiar with, and you’ll see that the conservative Web is larger than the liberal Web. Sites like Townhall, WorldNetDaily, and Free Republic have monthly audiences that regularly beat Daily Kos and the Huffington Post, to say nothing of Drudge, which still reigns supreme.
So the people are there, just as they’ve always been. My concern with some of the sites I discussed above is that for ten long years, they haven’t been giving our people Web experiences that teach them how to be more than simple readers.
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Not so quick on that Townhall vs. DailyKos comparison.
Alexa is a flawed measuring tool because it’s self-selected. According to Alexa, Ron Paul is even bigger than Barack Obama online.
Quantcast and Compete are more reliable because they depend on panels, so a bunch of Diggers installing a toolbar won’t skew the numbers.
Do you really buy those? Cause I’m loathe to think that either Kos or Townhall has LOST traffic in the last year, which is what Compete says.
The left has been able to unite behind its hatred against Bush, and its Vietnam-flashback desire to end the Iraq war immediately.
The right doesn’t quite have as much to unite behind.
[…] Patrick Ruffini is talking about the conservative web presence and outfits like Drudge and FreeRepublic. It would be one thing if we didn’t have any of these institutions, and could start from scratch just as the netroots did. My fear is that we have a bunch of institutions that still function somewhat well, but are long past their prime. With that, there is the danger we will slowly die without knowing it, as our techniques gradually lose effectiveness year after year. Just like newspaper circulation numbers. And there are a number of people on the right who are still complacent about this. […]
[…] Along a similar line, Patrick Ruffini argues a that the press focuses on the wrong questions: When covering the netroots vs. the rightroots, reporters look at things through a particular frame that by definition excludes the vast majority of grassroots activity on the right. For something to be newsworthy in this space, it must be blog-based, it must have emerged in the last five years, and it must be focused on elections over legislative or policy outcomes. […]
[…] Along a similar line, Patrick Ruffini argues a that the press focuses on the wrong questions: When covering the netroots vs. the rightroots, reporters look at things through a particular frame that by definition excludes the vast majority of grassroots activity on the right. For something to be newsworthy in this space, it must be blog-based, it must have emerged in the last five years, and it must be focused on elections over legislative or policy outcomes. […]
[…] All of this needs to be a lesson for both the right and the left. For the right, the lesson is that this isn’t just about technology. It is also about actual constituencies and voters and activists. The power of the (second generation, as opposed to the FreeRepublic generation, of the) online right won’t really come together until we find either a new set of people we can activate either financially or on the ground. (the netroots has done both) This will probably take an idea. (the netroots had partisanship and Bush-hating, which are not long-term, but effective in the short-term, and they might yet come out with policy ideas attached to the New Democratic Network) […]
[…] All of this needs to be a lesson for both the right and the left. For the right, the lesson is that this isn’t just about technology. It is also about actual constituencies and voters and activists. The power of the (second generation, as opposed to the FreeRepublic generation, of the) online right won’t really come together until we find either a new set of people we can activate either financially or on the ground. (the netroots has done both) This will probably take an idea. (the netroots had partisanship and Bush-hating, which are not long-term, but effective in the short-term, and they might yet come out with policy ideas attached to the New Democratic Network) […]
[…] For starters, I’d like to recommend Patrick Ruffini’s post from last week about the leaky pipes in the rightosphere. An excerpt: My co-blogger Hugh Hewitt refers to the “lead pipes” of the left-wing blogosphere that are slowly but surely contaminating the groundwater in the Democratic Party. But if their pipes are dirty, ours are leaky and badly in need of an overhaul. (At least if one wants to do more than just pass along positive information about the war.) […]
[…] Lead Pipes vs. Leaky Pipes By Patrick Ruffini At its height, Free Republic was the Daily Kos of the right. In fact, I think the stratospheric, un-blog-like traffic numbers of Kos can only be explained by Kos finally filling the Free Republic void on the Left. … Patrick Ruffini - http://www.patrickruffini.com […]
[…] Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum tell us (once again) that Democrats are superior to Republican online. (Oh, by the way, the sun rose in the east today.) Their piece appears in Politico and quotes extensively from a Patrick Ruffini blog post that I linked last week. Here’s an excerpt from Rasiej and Sifry’s op-ed: What all this means is it’s highly unlikely Republicans are going to turn the tide online – not until they wean themselves off their top-down habits and start using the Web more to foster community and collaboration. […]
[…] Dean Barnett writes in the Weekly Standard about the “Lopsided Netroots,” an analysis of why there’s no YearlyKos on the right. It’s a question that Mark Tapscott and Patrick Ruffini addressed last month, and one I remarked on more than once. […]
[…] My answer, as articulated here is that there is a conservative Daily Kos, that’s it’s Free Republic, but that it doesn’t really “count” since it’s not a blog, and more critically, it won’t play nicely with the rest of the movement and it doesn’t worship candidates like Kos does. […]
[…] Thanks to Patrick Ruffini, I stopped using Alexa about a month ago when comparing website traffic. My new favorites are Quantcast and Compete. Why? Here’s what Ruffini said: Alexa is a flawed measuring tool because it’s self-selected. According to Alexa, Ron Paul is even bigger than Barack Obama online. […]
[…] There’s been a long-running debate in the wingnutosphere about whether they should be “pundits” (like their heroes Rush and Hannity), or “activists” like the more effective progressive blogosphere. Here’s Patrick Ruffini’s latest on that theme, and it’s a fascinating debate. (See this as well). […]