Two interesting posts at Advertising Age in the last 24 hours–both taking different angles on how to deal with the fracturing media and marketing markets. The first, looks at how media properties must create partnerships, specifically communication and marketing partnerships that have specific audience reach, that together can wrap and intersect across the collective audience.

This requires a well-organized set of partnerships with the collective experience to extend a brand idea across a spectrum of disciplines, audiences and media channels. And identifying the best way to strategically align all respective talent will require new ways of thinking about business integration, new ways to approach brand management and new ways to collaborate with marketing partners.

What do you think Obama did?

Political campaigns, for example, employ many strategists, each honing “brand” communications to resonate with the issues, values and social culture germane to a particular constituency. In a great collaborative effort, Barack Obama partnered with Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, to develop a web presence and better employ the social networking that helped engage younger voters and clinch the Democratic nomination. The campaign also had a very well-organized grassroots effort with first-hand knowledge of the political climate and voting protocol in each state and the expertise to resonate with local communities. The collective skills of these local partners helped the “Obama brand” connect with its audience and raise capital in record proportions.

Embedded in the article, is the notion that these partnerships might not be with expected national partners, but might be a niched interests: local partners, representatives of specific audience segments, etc.. And last but not least, technology is the major tool to support that effort.

The internet, social networking and related media technologies have introduced many new media channels that permit audiences to group according to their vertical interests and to share and react to information in real time. Marketers need to harness the same technologies to combine resources and form marketing partnerships that can develop engaging conversations with these very specific audiences and realign quickly to maintain the conversation as the target, media or subject change.

The second post is actually a three minute video podcast (did you know Advertising Age has those? I just found out!) containing reflective and future looking perspectives on the impact and opportunities of vertical advertising networks. Vertical advertising networks are a response to to the fragmenting business and advertising markets for advertisers, publishers and hey, even consumers.

Will Morrison of ThinkPanmure noted how the VAN space was already cluttering up in the last few years. “Back in 2000, 2001 there were roughly 15 to 20 ad networks. Latest count, this Spring, we have got over 300.” Morrison also noted he saw the creation of a new high end, secondary market in the form of mobile ad networks and video ad networks, making it a more complex and overwhelming market for marketers and publishers.

I won’t go back to transcribe the whole thing, but I can say, you won’t waste your three minutes watching/listening.

Kurt Anderson has an interesting article on the Post-Russert Era at New York Magazine today. Some of the most salient paragraphs:

Until the mid-nineties, the pages and airtime available for reporting and explaining the news were scarce and precious, and middle-of-the-road high sobriety was the default mode for American journalism; to devote more than a tiny fraction of one’s mass-media platform to explicit opinion-mongering or mischief-making was literally unthinkable. But after cable TV and the Internet mooted that scarcity, attitude-laden takes on the news were permitted to propagate madly. The blithe post–Cold War unseriousness of the nineties helped as well. By the time of the 9/11 attacks, as The Daily Show had just started to achieve serious cultural traction and Fox News was about to overtake CNN in the ratings, the new paradigm had become unstoppable. Today, the strictly humorless big-time pundits—Paul Krugman, Charles Krauthammer—are the outliers. And so, perversely, thanks to modern technology, America has returned to its nineteenth-century roots: political discourse as entertainment, and almost everybody, from know-it-alls to wiseacres, mouthing off around the cracker barrel.

The commentariat has never been larger. But for all the new pundits, my hunch is that it possesses no more aggregate power than it did in the past. Instead, the same pie has been cut into smaller slices, with many more people scrambling to claim their little piece of visibility and influence. It’s a version of Warhol’s twisted insight, twisted a little more: In today’s commentariat, everyone is famous not for fifteen minutes but across fifteen micrometers of the bit of the celebrity bandwidth reserved for journalists.

What does this mean for the progressive media? Well, clearly we’re up against not only the dog-fight among the “mainstream” media to get attention, we’re up against each other as we seek to find a foothold in this new media world–from our celebrity journalists (that can be placed, linked to, talked about in the progressive, “mainstream” and conservative media world, to actually producing media that’s going to get placed, linked to, talked about–you get my picture. It’s also not just about what’s the click-through rates on our articles, how high the traffic is on our web sites (although it doesn’t hurt)–it’s about WHO is reading, watching and listening to our media. Who are we trying to mobilize/inform? Who are we trying to influence? Targeting our audience (or intended audiences) becomes harder and harder as the landscape becomes more and more saturated with more media and more systems to deliver media.

I’m just going to say it. The individual efforts of the progressive media are crucial. Everyone (well, mostly everyone) is hitting a particular sweet spot for their audience. Everyone can claim they are producing media that no one else is doing. For the most part, that’s true. But that’s not enough. The audiences are too small. The long-lasting impact is too disparate. It’s hard (I know from experience) to look beyond the daily survival of your media organization. But it’s time to get more collaborative and creative with our thinking in terms of partnerships and organized strategies.

We are not going to do this with the same old mentalities. I think we need to start applying some of the principles of grassroots organizing (ongoing campaigns, targets, strategic communiciations, alliance building, getting our hands dirty) to the media system. I think this will have have an impact on how we’re structuring and distributing the media as well as how we engage with our audiences (who now in my mind, are fellow media makers.) I think the basic tenets and principles of journalism will and should survive. In other words, while the internal organs will remain the same, the face needs some major plastic surgery. (Does that analogy make sense? I’ll keep working on it.)

So I’ve been a little slow on the blogging the last week and a half and that’s for a couple reasons.
1) I have carpal tunnel and tendonitis in my left wrist. Very painful and hard to type.
2) Jess and I were prepping for a presentation at the academic National Conference for Media Reform pre-conference where we presented our theories and latest examples from our book. (Happy to share if you want. We’re also figuring out how to get it on slide share.)
3) I was also prepping for my moderation of the NCMR panel, “How the Independent Media Makes Change.” In short, the panel rocked. (And I don’t usually say that about panels.) Panelists included Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, Jeff Morely of the Center for Independent Media and Daisy Hernandez of ColorLines. I’m going to be posting video and commentary on that asap. (I’m struggling through learning the new Imovie8 and having problems importing. Ah, technology.)

But most of all, I and the rest of The Media Consortium team were consumed by preparations for the launch of Live From Main Street. I could tell you all about it, but let me just repeat snippets of what LFMS host Laura Flanders wrote at the Huffington Post.

A year ago, a group of independent media professionals looked ahead to the 2008 election season. Anticipating the same stump speech in 50 states and the same old reporting to go along with it, they wondered, ‘what if, instead of the candidates’ horse-race, we covered goings-on around the track?’ The project we came up with together is Live from Main Street: a series of live events, in five states in five months, bringing audiences the local perspective on critical national issues.

On June 8, in Minneapolis, Live From Main Street kicked off in the Twin Cities. Locals weren’t just backdrop for a report a national story: they were the main event. On stage — discussing the election, organizing, media and more, were organizers, journalists, artists — sharing their accounts of the free speech challenges their community’s facing in the run-up to the Republican National Convention. And it wasn’t all bad news. Alongside the grim reports of permits denied and protests squashed, we heard the latest word on “unconventional” convention plans — “our roving reporters will be mounted on bicycles connected by GPS” Marlina Gonzales of the UnConvention told Live From Main Street. “Today’s Main Street is a new Main Street” said Malkia Cyril, Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice. Politicians make old assumptions at their peril, she added. It’s not just about bias, it’s about getting the story wrong.

Over the next five months, Live From Main Street will be hosting town-hall type discussions about critical issues in Miami, Denver, Columbus and Seattle. We want to take the agenda-setting out of the hands candidates’ consultants — and put an ear to the voters themselves. In Minneapolis, the focus was on civil liberties and the need for media diversity. In Miami in July, the attention will shift to cities and sustainable development. In Columbus, the topic’s voting; in Seattle, national security from a female point of view. We’ve heard from the politiicans. At the end of the election season, Live From Main Street hopes to have heard– and amplified what voters mean by that catchword “change.”

The first LFMS was an amazing success–with a raucous crowd of 450 people. But instead of me telling you about it: let’s just watch, shall we?

Welcome to Live From Main Street

Amy Goodman on Independent Media

Civil Liberties in the Twin Cities Pre-RNC

Live From Main Street: What the nation can learn from Minnesota

I’m looking for tools that will support syndication among The Media Consortium’s members. The goal is to leverage and share current content created by Media Consortium members (text, audio, photos, video, etc..) that builds upon our collective audiences and can reach new audiences. I’m told creating a searchable portal of MC members’ content and a widget (or a series of widgets) is technologically simple. I’m still doubtful (but maybe that’s because I’m a surface tech geek, not a hard core tech geek), but we shall see.

I’m envisioning a version of the AP wire–but instead of one company creating content that is distributed to all the other media outlets–all our members would syndicate to each other and pick each other up. And perhaps this content could be packaged and distributed to organizational allies, social network platforms, other types of media, etc. It makes no sense in this day and age of aggregators, portals and social networks to be proprietary about where your audience finds your news/message, whether its on Facebook, Digg, another news site, etc. And frankly, we can create a tool that will support the large base of progressive media, rather than focusing on the individual.

So at the moment, I’m gathering tools and ideas. Mochilla looks pretty interesting. I’m gathering more information as I write. Master of multi-tasking!

Two recent articles reveal some of the complexities surrounding efforts to build a progressive media sector that’s both robust and ethical:

In The Nation, Chris Hayes provides a disturbing examination of the under-the-radar distortions propagated by viral conservative e-mails:

Such is the power of the right-wing smear forward, a vehicle for the dissemination of character assassination that has escaped the scrutiny directed at the Limbaughs and Coulters and O’Reillys but one that is as potent as it is invisible. In 2004 putative firsthand accounts of Kerry’s performance in Vietnam traveled through e-mail in right-wing circles, presaging the Swift Boat attacks. Last winter a forward began circulating accusing Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim schooled in a radical madrassa (about which more later). While the story was later fed through familiar right-wing megaphones, even making it onto Fox, it has continued to circulate via e-mail long after being definitively debunked by CNN. In other words, the few weeks the smear spent in the glare of the mainstream media was just a tiny portion of a long life cycle, most of which has been spent darting from inbox to inbox.

In that respect, the e-mail forward doesn’t fit into our existing model of the right-wing noise machine’s structure (hierarchical) or its approach (broadcast). It is, instead, organic and peer-to-peer. If the manufactured outrage over Kerry’s botched joke about George Bush’s study habits was the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster, the Gold Star Mother smear was like one of those goofy viral videos of a dog on a skateboard on YouTube. Of course, some of those videos end up with 25 million page views. And now that large media companies understand their potential, they’ve begun trying to create their own. Which prompts the obvious question: if a handful of millionaires and disgruntled Swift Boat Veterans were able to sabotage Kerry’s campaign in 2004, what kind of havoc could be wreaked in 2008 by a few political operatives armed with little more than Outlook and a talent for gossip?

Meanwhile, over at Salon, Sidney Blumenthal provides a critique of the dangers of purely partisan media:

The growth of a countervailing conservative media machine has also been a decisive political factor in mobilizing public opinion and insulating a part of it from contamination of “liberal bias.” In October 2004, the University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes conducted a study, “The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters,” revealing that 72 percent of Bush supporters believed that Saddam Hussein had WMD and that it had been proven, even though there had been extensive news reports from the Iraq Survey Group that it had found no WMD. Furthermore, 75 percent of Bush supporters believed that Saddam was substantially helping al Qaeda, 63 percent believed that that evidence had been found, 60 percent believed that experts agreed with that conclusion, and 55 percent believed that the 9/11 Commission had proven the point, even though it proved exactly the opposite. Bush supporters did not hold these misperceptions because of inattention to the news. Another University of Maryland study, “Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War,” revealed that misperceptions varied significantly according to news sources and that higher levels of exposure to Fox News in particular compounded factual misperceptions and approval of Bush. Eighty percent of those who cited Fox News as a major source of their information suffered serious misperceptions, according to the study, compared to 23 percent citing National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System.

“Without protection against propaganda, without standards of evidence, without criteria of emphasis, the living substance of all popular decision is exposed to every prejudice and to infinite exploitation,” [Walter] Lippmann wrote in Liberty and the News. “The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist, can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information.” Yet Lippmann assumed that the people were passive, acted upon by politically motivated elites. Today, about one-third of the public actively chooses sources of information that play to their prejudices. The readers, listeners, and viewers of the Drudge Report, the Rush Limbaugh show, and Fox News have consciously selected “the quack, the charlatan, the jingo” to seal themselves from objective information. The “breakdown of the means of public knowledge,” as Lippmann called it, rests on a carefully cultivated preference for crank opinion over unsettling fact. The more reality defies this public’s understanding, the more fervently it redoubles its resistance to it, embracing the distorted stereotype as the only true account.

The entrenchment and exploitation of this segment of public opinion has become big business and political necessity on the right. In May 2003, Matt Labash, a writer for the neoconservative journal The Weekly Standard (published by Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News), explained how the conservative attack on “liberal bias” operated as a profitable game. “While all these hand-wringing Freedom Forum types talk about objectivity, the conservative media likes to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective,” he said. “We’ve created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective. It pays to be subjective as much as possible. It’s a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It’s a great little racket. I’m glad we found it actually.”

Progressives like to think of themselves as card-carrying members of the “reality-based community.” But partisanship by its very nature tugs against nuance and complexity–and the left has plenty of its own cranks. And those seeking to counter and match smears like those spread by the emails that Hayes describes need a different mindset and toolset than progressive journalists striving to present the world as it is rather than as those in power would have it.

Both are needed to counter the conservative’s noise machine. But when and how should they work together?