Despite dismal ratings and growing evidence that the public could care less, news and political websites are waging an uphill battle at the Democratic Convention this week for an audience that appears indifferent and dwindling.
During the Republican gathering two weeks ago, traffic at most of the sites offering online convention coverage dropped sharply. Media Metrix, which measures Internet traffic, says MSNBC.com’s audience plummeted 27 percent. CNN.com lost 18 percent of its normal audience.
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In fact, a Harvard University study released over the weekend concluded that “Americans had almost no interest in experiencing the convention over the Internet.”
Alex S. Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, offered a blunt assessment of the problem during a panel discussion this week in Los Angeles.
“There is a great deal of supply but very little demand,” he said. “If the Internet is going to be successful in having an impact on politics, it’s going to have to find a way to attract people to it.”
So far, there’s not much to indicate that is happening.
One of the most prominent sites at the GOP gathering bowed out of the Democratic event. Pseudopolitics.com said the cost of ambitious Internet coverage just wasn’t worth the measly audience return. Besides, the site’s GOP coverage plan was copied and put online in Los Angeles not by a rival political or new portal but by the Democrats themselves.
The party’s website went online streaming live, 360-degree user-adjustable cameras, live chat with speakers and even “raw” video shot by student filmmakers on the convention floor. But their coverage, if that’s what it can be called, felt more like a giant college pep rally than a meaningful effort to cover the event and the issues it’s supposed to be all about.
It wasn’t much better with the news sites.
Despite the apparent public apathy toward online convention coverage, all of the network TV websites and a dozen or so other political sites and e-zines continued to devour enormous amounts of bandwidth with gavel-to-gavel webcasts.
And, once again, the big news sites from MSNBC and CNN and ABC did a reasonable job of telling the story. Such as it was. But after watching their coverage, it became clear that political conventions simply aren’t big stories anymore. The more intensive the coverage the more apparent it is that conventions don’t offer much more than contrived spectacle and predictable pageantry.
The streaming video is viewable only in a one-by-one-inch box. Unless you have a high-speed cable or DSL Internet connection, it’s jerky and frequently interrupted by net congestion. If people are turning off network television coverage, which at least offers quality sound and images, it’s beyond me why an online site would expect to draw an audience with herky-jerky Internet video and intermittent audio.
After two nights of surfing the sites and watching and reading the online coverage, all the sites began looking alike. With rare exception, the fare was the same: anchorman/columnist commentaries, reporter e-journals, streaming video feeds, interactive factoids and — on every site — driveling chat, chat, chat that the sites tried to pawn off as insightful dialogue.
As every reporter eventually learns from doing person-on-the-street interviews, it takes a lot more than giving somebody a soapbox to get meaningful dialogue. The chat was usually off-subject and often profane.
Take MSNBC’s Live Chat with John Hockenberry on Monday night. I counted 49 chatters online as Hockeberry debriefed other reporters and looked for relevant comments and questions from the chat room.
In the chat box next to streaming video that showed Hockenberry in the Skybox, someone called “MSNBC-Will” kept trying to bring order to the confusing and numerous conversation threads that were quickly scrolling up the screen.
“We’re looking for statements, not questions,” he wrote.
Nobody paid him the slightest attention.
“Statements about what it’s going to take to win this race,” he clarified a few lines later.
The chatters continued to ignore him. He tried again. “Statements about what’s good or bad about the characters.”
Still, no one paid any attention.
You could almost feel his exasperation when, a screen later, he wrote: “None of this passive aggressive stuff like ‘would the smelly Democrats be less smelly if they weren’t so lousy?'”
But no one seemed to heed his instructions. Instead, somebody with the handle HC53 predicted a guy named Rudy was going to win the Survivor TV show.
Over in the chat room at e-vote, they weren’t even trying to be serious. Instead, mimicking the campy comedy show, Mystery Science Theatre, e-vote called it’s chat feature “Mystery Election Theater 2000.”
The site used streaming podium video from C-Span. In a chat box below, the screen, e-vote commentators offered snarky comments about the speakers, just like on the silly TV show. Typical of their attempted wit was the assessment offered as California Gov. Gray Davis spoke from the podium.
“This guy actually has less charisma than Al Gore,” typed one of the commentators, called evoteServo.
And that’s the way it was too often on too many of the sites: juvenile. Technologically engaging at times but much too often, substantively bereft.
