Wednesday, the S.C. Chamber of Commerce released its endorsements for the Democratic and Republican gubernatorial primaries. Sen. Vince Sheheen took the nod for the Democrats, which is not very surprising. With the exit of Charleston attorney Mullins McLeod and Columbia lobbyist Dwight Drake from the race, it’s not hard to figure out that Sheheen will best Supt. of Ed. Jim Rex and Sen. Robert Ford for the nomination.
The Republican endorsement went to U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett. Making a decision in that race is way more risky for anyone this far out from the primary. Barrett, Atty. Gen. Henry McMaster and Lt. Gov. André Bauer are in a three-way dogfight for the nomination, and it’s only going to get nastier as the months go on until June.
Wednesday afternoon, the Sheheen campaign launched a new Facebook effort: “Hey, folks — let’s beat Gresham Barrett to the 5,000 mark in FB fans! It would be great if you could click on ‘Suggest to Friends’ underneath the profile picture. Thanks!” That was followed by Barrett’s page responding with, “We’ve been challenged. The Sheheen campaign is trying to beat us to 5,000 fans. Help us get there first by clicking the ‘Suggest to Friends’ link under my picture.” Barrett made it first.
All of this is to say that it looks like the leading candidates for both nominations are already preparing to go at it. That means that the other guys — Rex, Ford, McMaster, Bauer — better step up their campaigns, or the general election campaign will start before the June primary showdown.
As CNN reported on Monday, a study by the Pew Research Center has revealed that 61 percent of Americans get at least some of their news online, compared to 54 percent from the radio and 50 percent from a print publication. In economic terms, this could be called a lagging indicator. A lot of people started going online in the early ’90s, and by the mid-’90s it was a full-on flood.
Part of the reason certainly is people growing older who have grown up with the Internet. Our family got Prodigy in 1990, AOL a few years later and by around ‘96, went to the sort of independent Internet provider that became the norm in the Naughty Aughts. People in their 20s right now learned to stop going to the library to research papers and projects and instead turned to the Web. So have many in their 30s. By now, those that are older who weren’t early adapters are now plugged in. Hence, why Facebook’s largest-growing demographic are those who are middle-aged. Indeed, our uncle, a Vietnam veteran, just asked to be a neighbor on FarmVille.
So, the social media aspect has changed a lot about how people interact with the news. While 10 years ago you might go to nytimes.com or thestate.com or whathaveyou, now you see something on your Facebook feed, or linked through Twitter. And there’s always that old standby, email.
Seventy-five percent of respondents said they get news forwarded through e-mail or posts on social networking sites, while 37 percent of online users said they’ve reported news, commented on a story or shared it on sites like Facebook and Twitter, the survey said.
“To a great extent, people’s experience of news, especially on the Internet, is becoming a shared social experience … ,” reads the report. “[T]he advent of social media like social networking sites and blogs has helped the news become a social experience in fresh ways for consumers.”
Most people said they use between two and five online news sources, and 65 percent said they don’t have a single favorite Web site for news.
But, as we said, the report is a lagging indicator. Changes in how people get their news have been making news for years. To make a print publication worthwhile, the design and content has to significantly change your news consuming experience than reading it online. Hence, it makes more sense to pick up a copy of the Free Times than reading it on the Web — unless you’re reading “This Just In.” With most newspapers, you don’t even have to go to the site.
Here’s the next step, to which many people have already adapted: RSS readers. Remember in the old days, when you’d hear about some intellectual or powerful person who read five or six newspapers a day? Anybody can do that these days, with a properly formatted RSS reader. We’re big fans of Google Reader. But, use what you like. The first hour or two of our day is always spent going through the hundreds of stories in the Reader. Sure, most of them aren’t worth reading, but it’s pretty easy to run through the stories you’re not interested in to the ones you are interested in — not much different than flipping the pages in a daily paper, except you’re doing it with 30 papers and 20 blogs.
As far as radio for news, actually firing up the radio and listening in has been rendered pointless. Around five or six years ago, podcasts were a thing done by a lot of amateurs, rather like the first blogs. When corporate radio caught on — and corporate TV in some instances with video podcasts — that changed. You can open up iTunes and listen to all the shows you would like, when you’d like. As we’ve said, it’s TiVO for the radio, and it’s fabulous. Don’t want to wake up early on Saturday for “Car Talk?” Or organize your weekday mornings for “The Dan Patrick Show?” No problem. It’s waiting right there in your podcasts.
Then, yes, there’s Facebook and Twitter (and other social media networks). Beginning last year, we’ve been regularly monitoring our Facebook and Twitter feeds for something interesting. Needless to say, it was better in ye olde ‘09 before so many South Carolina politicos were called out for saying the dumbest things of all time, and banning/unfriending us for calling them out on it.
Regardless, the future of news is on the Internet. Will it mean the end for the other mediums? Not likely. People said radio would kill the newspaper, TV would kill the radio, &c. It’s just going to mean that the mediums will all change to fit the niche to which they’re supposed.
Well, isn’t this interesting. It appears that Rep. Nikki Haley is still hanging on to an unfounded, unproven and to the best of our knowledge, untrue rumor regarding her Web site. Remember when all that happened? It was in those fine times of the mid-Summer, when Columbia feels like the ninth circle of Hell. Our own apartment averaged 80 degrees at night. It was fun.
Yeah, so it was rumored that we were receiving inside information about Haley from Under The Power Lines, which had run Haley’s site before she announced for governor. Actually, no — it wasn’t so much rumored. The Haley campaign just went to their lackey, Will Folks, to put a hit on us and UTPL for something that had absolutely no evidence, except for the fact that the Haley campaign was then, as is now, dead in the water and leaking like a rotten wooden-hulled ship. That was piggy-backed on an earlier post of dubious repute, which led to what happened today.
Haley sent a Facebook message to Nancy Mace, the woman who took over Folks site and had a chance to operate Haley’s site.
Around here, we have a phrase for such nuttery: total fucking bullshit. Really, if there was any, and we mean absolutely any, truth to this allegation, it would have hit the papers and local TV stations months ago. But, it’s not true, ergo there is no evidence, except for a blog post written by Haley’s Internet boy.
Just another example that Haley’s a decidedly second-tier gubernatorial candidate that would have been better served by staying in the House and serving her friends at S.C. Club for Growth, South Carolinians for Responsible Government, the S.C. Policy Council and the last few remainders of the Sanford crowd.
Sometimes it’s like the General Assembly is like the minor league to Congress. You can say something stupid, deal with a mini-scandal, learn from it and move on to the big leagues. Rep. Jeff Duncan, who is trying to make the leap from the S.C. House to the U.S. House, made the mistake of putting up a picture with a bad joke on his Facebook wall photos.
It’s funny ’cause he’s Kenyan! And some of the craziest people in American politics today are the birthers. Why not throw in your lot with Orly Taitz? Great political instincts there.
When we wrote about Sen. Larry Grooms, who is running for governor, sending out Facebook messages suggesting you become a fan of his, we thought maybe people would stop. After all, it just looks silly.
Welcome to the party, Charleston Mayor Joe Riley.
This sort of thing kills us every time it happens. Which, considering the rapid approach of 2010, is only going to be more and more often. Here’s a social media tip for the campaigns out there — get a number of people friendly to the candidate to suggest you become a fan of the candidate.
Otherwise, people are just going to laugh.
Sometimes, it feels too easy to run smack on Atty. Gen. Henry McMaster’s gubernatorial campaign. Those guys make it so easy. It is, truly, a joke. Not as much of a joke as McLovin’s “LINDSEY GRAHAM, OUR SENATOR,” tweets, but there’s a limit for everybody.
Anyway, it didn’t surprise us too much that McMaster drew on his son’s presidency of the Rho chapter of the Kappa Alpha Order (that’s at Carolina) to get people to walk in the parade for him on Labor Day in Chapin. Really — rich Southern fraternity boys? Chapin? Hell, a good portion of them probably had parents within 15 minutes of the parade route.
From what we were told, there was some leaning on the pledges. In case you don’t know, pledging a major Southern fraternity can go six months, if you start in late August. Our sources told us it was tantamount to a requirement that the pledges show up. Who knew you could just draft freshmen college students as volunteers? Not a bad asset to have.
Looks like pledges and their girlfriends to us.
But, of course, it’s not the first time the McMasters and KA has come to our attention. There was the classic Facebook fiasco, with homoerotic pictures of Henry Jr. with his fraternity brothers, and a page devoted to McMaster’s daughter, who was then in high school.
So there’s, um, that. Then there’s the beer. Yeah, yeah, we know that the Quinns sold off The Back Porch. That doesn’t seem to have stopped S.C. political consulting’s on-campus bar from ending the influence. After the parade, it was the site of the KA “volunteers’” after-party.
From: [Redacted]
To: Rho Chapter of KA
Subject: [Rho Chapter of KA] Volunteering Monday for Henrys Dad
Sent: Sep 4, 2009 4:59 PMMonday. Meeting at back porch. Bus leaves at 8. Driving to camden [sic] for the parade. We will be back at 1130. Free domestic beers at back porch. Catered by Hudsons BBQ. Everybody gets a fratty campaign tee and bumper stickers
A “fratty campaign tee?” Beer? Barbecue? Sign us up!
Apparently, S.C. political consulting firm Richard Quinn & Associates has a new media firm. Two Lantern Media (Robert Newman, for the win) was started up on Jan. 8, with RQ&A consultant Adam Piper as its registered agent (he was replaced by Harrison Brant in late June). However, in eight months, the group has done a grand total of six Web sites.
That’s right. Six.
And four don’t really count. The four sites were done for in-house parties The Palmetto Scoop, Rep. Rex Rice (who is an RQ&A client running for the Republican nomination for SC-03), Rice site stopdeficitspending.com and attorney general client Alan Wilson. The other two were for S.C. Club for Growth and GOP gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley. Our ol’ drunk wheelin’ friend McLovin said of his August redesign, “I absolutely love the design because it is crisp, clean, and offers easy access to the thing that keeps y’all coming back: Great content. I would like to extend a HUGE hand to the site’s designers, an up-and-coming firm in Columbia called Two Lantern Media. You can check out their own brand new website by clicking here.” Lordy. Transparency, thy name is Fogle.
As well, for a new media firm, its use of social networking has been pretty sad.
For instance, there’s the Two Lantern page on Facebook. It has one fan. Any guesses as to who that fan is?
Its performance on Twitter hasn’t been any better — two tweets. Period. A trained monkey running a company would do better than that.
Maybe these guys should have, oh, we don’t know, actually talked to a new media professional before launching this thing.
Slate’s irregular indulgence in graphic design and whimsy known as “Barack Obama’s Facebook Feed” is one of the best parts of the weekend. The online magazine’s Christopher Beam and Chris Wilson manage to distill recent political happenings into a hysterical political satire in the style of your average Facebook news feed, without all the posts about FarmVille and Mafia Wars.
The entry from Aug. 21 was another out-of-the-park effort, including bits like the jokes on the continuing misadventures of Vice President Joe Biden.
Of course, the health care debate figured prominently, since President Barack Obama seems hell-bent on recreating former President Bill Clinton’s first term. Even U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint’s tweets came in for a feature.
In case that was too Dennis Miller-esque for you, the Siege of Petropavlovsk (which you should never have heard of) occurred in the Pacific theater of the Crimean War in the 1850s. That naval and land battle was a smashing victory for the Russians, who inflicted five times as many casualties as they received against the British and the French. It was also full of gray areas: when his ship opened up its cannons on the town, British Admiral David Price shot himself. And, a while after repulsing the allied forces, the Russians ended up evacuating the garrison at Petropavlovsk during the winter. This has been your obscure history lesson for the day.
So, yeah — Slate’s got jokes.
Looks like we hit a nerve the other day when we reported that Rep. Tommy Stringer, on Twitter and Facebook, wrote, “Never buy a cat – Especially one that bites. Humane society charged me to take the dang thing back. Should have drowned it in my moat.” Naturally, having an elected official joking around about drowning cats and being clearly unable to take care of one struck us as something that says a lot about that person.
And now, it seems like he couldn’t handle the blowback from saying foolish things on the Internet, as he blocked WR from following him on Twitter and unceremoniously unfriended us on Facebook. Frankly, we’re surprised it didn’t happen earlier, what with him being one of the wholly-owned subsidiaries of Howard Rich & Co., taking $10,000 from that cabal during the 2008 primaries. And, his campaign manager was neo-Confederate consultant of Sen. Lee Bright, Chris Sullivan of Richard Quinn & Associates and his own ridiculously named Skyagunsta firm (yes, we know where the name comes from — it’s still ridiculous).
This reaction ranks right up there with former S.C. Republican Party executive director Jay W. Ragley blocking our cat on Twitter. That’s harsh, man.
