{"id":15214,"date":"2015-05-05T11:06:23","date_gmt":"2015-05-05T15:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15214"},"modified":"2015-05-05T11:06:23","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T15:06:23","slug":"what-will-snapchat-do-to-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15214","title":{"rendered":"what will Snapchat do to politics?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joanthan Mahler reports <\/a>that “Snapchat, America\u2019s fastest-growing smartphone app,\u00a0[has]\u00a0hired Peter Hamby, a political reporter for CNN, to lead its nascent news division.” Snapchat has more than 1oo million users, including many Americans between the ages of 18 and 31. Mahler quotes President Obama’s former senior strategist\u00a0Dan Pfeiffer:\u00a0\u201cThere is no harder riddle to solve in politics than reaching young Americans who are very interested in the future of their country but don\u2019t engage with traditional news.” By entering the political news business, Pfeiffer thinks, “Snapchat may have just made it a whole lot easier to solve this riddle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Snapchat’s potential to increase young adults’ involvement with\u00a0politics is one reason that the news about Peter Hamby is interesting. The other reason is an apparent contradiction. Snapchat is famous for extreme brevity. A “Snap” lasts on your phone or other device for no longer than 10 seconds. Hamby, as Mahler notes, wrote a report<\/a> for Harvard\u2019s Shorenstein Center about–as it turns out–the damage that Twitter’s brevity and speed has done to American politics. I quote from the final section of the report:<\/p>\n

No one is complaining about the revolutionary gateway to news and information that Twitter provides. But plenty of people in politics are anxious about the way the Twitter conversation thrives on incrementalism, self-involvement and snark.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt made me think smaller when I should have been thinking bigger,\u201d said Sam Youngman.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwitter just gives you an outlet for when you\u2019re bored,\u201d said another reporter who traveled on the Romney plane. \u201cIt\u2019s just stupid shit you are not thinking about the ramifications of.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Dickerson [Slate writer and CBS Political Director], hardly a new media curmudgeon, called Twitter \u201ca mess for campaign coverage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt makes us small and it makes us pissed off and mean, because Twitter as a conversation is incredibly acerbic and cynical and we don\u2019t need more of that in coverage of politics, we need less,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cI still don\u2019t know how reporters sit and watch a speech, and live tweet a speech, and also have the bandwidth to listen to what candidates are saying, and actually think about it and absorb it so they can right a comprehensive story afterwards,\u201d said Liz Sidoti of the Associated Press.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think the Twitter culture helps anybody create great journalism,\u201d said Garrett Haake. \u201cIf you’re trying to be the first person that put it out at 140 characters, you\u2019re probably not thinking about the broader context in which you want to present something.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026 Dickerson\u2019s take: \u201cIf I were running an actual news division, I would probably ban people from Twitter in some way.\u201d That Dickerson, one of the more forward-thinking and tech-savvy reporters in the business, would even consider such an idea speaks to how frustrated many campaign veterans are with today\u2019s shoot-first-and-update-later style of political journalism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hamby’s paper for the Shorenstein Center is the exact opposite of a tweet. It is\u00a0leisurely, anecdotal, sprinkled with character sketches, and 95 pages long. It doesn’t start with a gripping thesis or end with a sharply defined message\u00a0but gradually unfolds an argument for\u00a0the value of\u00a0long-form journalism through the quoted opinions of others. You could almost say it exemplifies “negative capability<\/a>,” John\u00a0Keats’ phrase for not<\/em> letting one’s own views determine how one sees the world.<\/p>\n

Snapchat doesn’t\u00a0exactly seem built for negative capability. So it is fascinating to speculate how a gifted writer of long-form journalism who decries the trivialization of politics will use this tool to cover the 2016 election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joanthan Mahler reports that “Snapchat, America\u2019s fastest-growing smartphone app,\u00a0[has]\u00a0hired Peter Hamby, a political reporter for CNN, to lead its nascent news division.” Snapchat has more than 1oo million users, including many Americans between the ages of 18 and 31. Mahler quotes President Obama’s former senior strategist\u00a0Dan Pfeiffer:\u00a0\u201cThere is no harder riddle to solve in politics […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-election","category-press-criticism"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15214"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15216,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15214\/revisions\/15216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}