Andrew Golis

• Election Web Sites Plot to Hold Their Viewers
  Let the games begin.
  (tags: new.media finance advertising blogging metrics 08 wsj)

From Josh on the motherblog:

TPM IN 2009 AND BEYOND

After each of the last three election cycles, we’ve expanded TPM and changed the kind of organization we are. Along the way we’ve gone from a staff of one in early 2005 to a staff of eleven today.

After the 2004 cycle, we began launching TPM’s sister sites (starting with TPMCafe.com) and building our own original reporting capacity (starting with TPMmuckraker.com).

After the 2006 election, we took that small network of sites with commentary and focused original reporting and began expanding it into a full service news site for political and hard national news, with original reporting, news aggregation and breaking news. That involved our move into video (with TPMtv), hiring new reporters and redesigning the site’s main page with the news section you see to the right.

Now that the 2008 election is over we wanted to share with you what we have planned for 2008 and beyond. TPM began during the 2000 recount. And its evolution has been always been bound up with my stance as a voice of opposition to the Bush administration. So the end of the Bush years and the beginning of a new Democratic administration presents us with something dramatically new.

In fact, I think it’s important to step back to recognize just how new it is in the history of the country. On paper, there was last unified Democratic control in Washington sixteen years ago during President Clinton’s first two years in office and before that during President Carter’s presidency. Looks, however, are deceiving. For more than half a century before 1992, the Democratic party was actually two parties, even after the Civil Rights movement cleared the old-style segregationists and neo-dixiecrats from the party — a national party and a southern one, a fact that created conservative governing majorities on numerous issues. What’s more, both Clinton and Carter ran on platforms of bucking their party and its entrenched congressional majorities. For both these reasons and many others, what will begin in January is something this country hasn’t really seen since the first half of the 20th century.

So January will usher in a new Democratic Ascendancy in Washington. And here at TPM we believe we are uniquely qualified to chronicle it. So to that end we are hiring two new reporter-bloggers to be based in Washington, DC, one assigned to the White House and one assigned to Capitol Hill. The Obama White House and the expanded Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill are unquestionably the political story of the next two years. And with your help we plan to be there on the ground and and here in New York, covering it in force, fully, critically and down to the minute. We want to keep you informed on what you’d know if you were reporting every day at the White House or on the Hill. Think of us, in that sense, as an insiders’ publication for outsiders, which is how I’ve always thought of us.

Now, the big dailies have dozens of reporters on this story. And the VC-backed internet outlets have not many fewer than that. So we’re not going to — and it’s never been our plan — to compete on numbers. But we do have you — an audience that is more engaged than that of any other publication covering what we cover. That’s not only important in the sense of the general support you’ve given us over the years that has allowed us to grow to this point. You’re also a critical part of our reporting model, our big leg up on everyone else. And that’s a relationship and a resource we’re going to continue to deepen and rely on as we make this big next step.

We’ll be sharing a lot more details with you over the next few weeks and months. So much more to come. If you have any questions comments, I’d love to hear from you.

Now that the election is over, I have time to listen to music.  First stop, New Porn:

We just got this in the mail.  The photo has the headline “Joe finally gets a signal on his iPhone and breathes a sigh of relief”:

My generation just elected a president.  What has your flat earth boomer ass done?

This is pretty strange and wonderful.  Ana Marie Cox (of Wonkette fame, but more recently of Time and Radar) has been asking readers to fund her travel with the McCain campaign.  Time stopped paying when they had to tighten their belt, and Radar stopped paying when they, well, died.  SO, she’s asked the 5,000 people who follow her on Twitter and reader her personal blog to help her make up the costs and stay on the trail.  

Apparently she’s now taken that to a new level, creating a subsciption only Twitter feed.  Hilarious:

• Harris and Vandehei deliver a "State of Politico" letter on election eve
  I'm continuously impressed by them in business and publishing terms, while continually dismayed by the style w/ which they choose to cover election (like baseball). Fascinating reading though.
  (tags: politico new.media politics mediabistro advertising finance)
• Huffington Post Just Keeps Growing
  Freaking huge.
  (tags: metrics new.media huffpo seo mediabistro)
• The Dr. Maddow Show -The secret to the success of a wonky lesbian pundit with no TV experience? A Ph.D. from Oxford, a dry sense of humor, and the ability to be nice to Pat Buchanan.
  Yet another Rachel Maddow profile.
  (tags: rachel.maddow msnbc television nymag)

Business Week’s “Where to Get Live Election Night Coverage Online“:

If you’re looking for election night coverage by and for people like you, there are plenty of sites to turn to. The left-leaning blog Talking Points Memo, for instance, has really thrived this election season, raking in a record 16.3 million YouTube video views in September.

For its election night coverage, the site will be live-streaming (most likely using the cell phone-based service Qik from Obama’s Chicago headquarters) and providing live election results via a map created in partnership with Google (GOOG). It will also be live-blogging and posting TV news clips it records off network TV. 

The Wall Street Journal’s “Politics Sites Prep For Game Day“:

Talking Points Memo, in conjunction with Google, is updating an interactive results map while two editors shoot video in Chicago. “What we’re really trying to do is to present full-service news coverage of Election Night and not just commentary and isolated reporting, which is what some people might expect from an outfit that started as a blog,” says TPM editor Josh Marshall.

The Times Online’s ”The Top 25 websites for US election obsessives“:

7: Talking Points Memo Talking Points Memo will be livestreaming from Obama’s headquarters and posting results with a map created with its partner Google.

I did an interview yesterday w/ a media reporter for the BBC.  She’s got a piece up today about what new media outlets are doing for election day.

Looks like she turned her notes into one big quote from me, but I’m not complaining:

The High Profile Political Bloggers

Andrew Gollis of Talking Point Memo

Andrew Gollis is the deputy editor of Talking Points Memo, a well known political network of blogs produced by practised journalists and reporters. 

 We’ve been covering the lead up to this event for 22 months now.  

We started using the live streaming video site Qik as part of our coverage of the Republican and Democratic party conventions.

We had people on the floor of the conventions there sending video back live.

For election night we are in Chicago with the Obama campaign. A mix of people will be recording interviews and crowd reactions there.

We’ll have crowd responses and about a dozen updates from mid-afternoon on Tuesday and then all the way through the night depending on how things go.

We’ll be posting these video reports into the main TPM blog. There’s no real production, it’s all pretty live and the Qik stuff can be a bit rough but it’s adding value.

TPM is not citizen journalism. It’s trained reporters and journalists using new media tools.

As a network of established political blogs that has around three million readers, we hope that our readers find the video content is something that keeps them interested.