Reframing Activism vs. Punditry
by Patrick Ruffini :: October 1st, 2007 12:06 amMisconceptions abound in the common framing of activism vs. punditry on the left and right. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard the excuse “We’re not like the left,” or the idea that getting action out of conservative blogs is like herding cats.
Hogwash.
Recent experiments tell me that the activism deficit is not with the readership. It’s with the leadership.
The last two weeks have seen active end-of-quarter fundraising campaigns for Jim Ogonowski (MA-5) and Eric Egland (CA-4) (disclosure). Combined, these campaigns are closing in on $25,000 in contributions — a healthy contribution to the bottom lines of candidates only expected to raise about $100,000.
The Ogonowski campaign was posted by me on HughHewitt.com, which gets about 30,000 readers a day. The Egland campaign is being led by Red State, which gets about 20,000. Each has been monetized to the tune of about $0.50 per daily reader.
A similar push over three days on Daily Kos should yield $300,000, given its 600,000 daily readership. How does this stack up in reality? A few weeks ago, Kos’s Burn Bush campaign in WA-8 raised $88,000. This was pushed heavily throughout the leftosphere.
Now, it’s cold comfort to claim credit for a campaign that still raised vastly less. I’m certainly not going to be happy until we can post similar numbers. But the fact is that our numbers per reader were better, belying the notion that conservatives are somehow allergic to mass action on the Web. This isn’t surprising either. Conservatives are more likely to have disposable income they can give to a cause or campaign.
Another anecdotal point is that the commenters on Hugh’s site tended to side with me on the need for more activism in the rightroots. I also think that intuitively makes sense. Very few people in the real world are professional pundits. But they are accustomed to opening their wallets for a cause they believe in, and they really don’t mind being asked so long as the volume is reasonable.
The activism gap on the right side of the Web is not with the readers, who are more than willing to give (even to a less than perfect candidate in the right circumstances). It’s with bloggers who won’t ask anything of their readers beside reading. The reason I assigned a specific dollar value per reader before (I do this in presentations too) is to underscore the fact that there really are predictable results. I’ve launched more than a few such campaigns over email and the blogosphere, and each time, I generally know what to expect and where to set the goal and the ask. I’m rarely if ever disappointed by the response.
So what to do to get more activism?
1. Get more readers.
Well, duh. But it’s true. If we’re already beating Kos reader-per-reader, we don’t need quite as many readers to match up — but we need to be in the ballpark. Having top conservative blogs in the 50,000 - 100,000 daily reader range with Kos at 600,000 just won’t cut it. Of course, we wouldn’t have this issue if Free Republic were structured the same as Kos, and important action alerts were bumped up to the top.
The readership gap incidentally isn’t because Kos is activist. Activism posts on both right and left generally attract fewer comments and traffic than punditry. It’s because Kos represents the visceral reaction to Bush on the left. We have our own visceral sites, but they’re generally locked into antiquated platforms that don’t make directed communication very easy. Our blogs will probably have to be “dumbed down” (or displaced) to get those kind of numbers, and incumbent bloggers are understandably reluctant.
But letting go of some control brings clear benefits. A larger audience builds room for larger specialized sub-markets, like state and Congressional district blogs, or investigative sites like TPM Muckraker. It builds a bigger platform for activism and for your blog work to actually have an impact.
2. Be a results-oriented pundit.
Here’s another thing about Kos. Relatively little about it is “activist.” I subscribe to Kos in my feedreader and I instantly can tell which posts are his just by looking at the titles. It’s generally just him blogging hardcore about Senate races. The other frontpagers — Hunter, Devilstower, MissLaura, DemfromCT, georgia10, SusanG, Kagro X, DarkSyde, mcjoan — tend to blog more about general interest stuff, the war, Bush, etc. So the leading blog of the left, just like the leading ones of the right, is still mostly about providing content.
The idea that I want blogging just to be about activism is a straw man. Most activism on blogs will still be punditry, but it will be results-oriented punditry. Look at what the lefty blogs are doing to advance damaging narratives about Republican elected officials, often at a hyper-local level. This is called framing, and it’s important.
If you want to be an “activist” in the blogosphere, the best thing you can do is to become the authority on the topic/cause/hobbyhorse of your choice. Build a massive audience that includes every reporter covering that beat, and stay focused on the cause. If you’re a local blogger and you start blogging about Iran, you’ve undermined that focus.
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