On Innovation

This new Paul Ryan meme got us thinking about other political Tumblrs. We’re looking for good ones that we may not have heard of. So, if you know of any, please share. We asked readers the same question on WashingtonPost.com:

Tumblr isn’t a household name in politics. Yet.

For those of you who don’t know what Tumblr is, it’s — basically — a new(ish) blogging platform that allows seamless sharing of videos, links, quotes and almost anything else you can find on the Internet. (Check out our music Tumblr — it’s called Sir Fix-A-Lot — for an example of what it looks like. SELF PROMOTION ALERT!)

And Tumblr is starting to catch on in the political world.

Take the Tumblr “Hey Girl It’s Paul Ryan” , which came to our attention today and hinges on the the Wisconsin Republican’s efforts to eliminate the deficit and imagines that Ryan — like heartthrob actor Ryan Gosling — is able to make women swoon.

Generic shots of Ryan are paired with lines like “Hey Girl, let’s move forward with our relationship… by cutting spending and putting our love on a path to prosperity.” (That “Hey Girl” line builds off of a Ryan Gosling Tumblr that took off in 2010.)

The (Paul) Ryan Tumblr comes on the heels of “Texts From Hillary”, a Tumblr so popular that President Obama joked about it during his White House Correspondents Dinner speech on Saturday night .

The Fix — ever in search of the next big thing in politics — wants to hear from our community. Do you have a favorite political Tumblr? Do you run a favorite political Tumblr? Make your suggestions in the comments section and we will round up the best of the best in a separate blog post later this week.

via Chris Cillizza and T.J. Ortenzi.

(via heygirlitspaulryan)

By Emi Kolawole

If you’ve been following the Post’s political coverage, you’ve probably come across @MentionMachine. The tool, which tracks mentions of the 2012 presidential candidates on Twitter and in the media generally, launched Tuesday and is the brainchild of Executive Producer Cory Haik.

I spoke with Haik Friday morning to discuss how @MentionMachine came to be and the impact it might have on election reporting.

“Well, we’d been talking about Twitter and the elections since I’d walked in the door of the Post,” said Haik, who started a little over a year ago as deputy editor of the Post’s Universal News Desk. She has since become Executive Producer for News Innovation and Strategic Projects.

Concepts can either fizzle or thrive depending on available resources. In this case, Haik had already chosen a name. “I feel like once you give something a name, it becomes a thing,” she said. “I squatted on the Twitter account long before it was even an official project, because I thought, ‘This thing’s gonna’ work.’”

After a series of memos, meetings, and presentations on a wash-rinse-and-repeat cycle, Haik started to bring newsroom resources to bear on the project, teaming up with Washington Post National Digital Editor Amanda Zamora, Developers Jesse Foltz and Sean McBride, Designer Katie Parker and PostPolitics Social Media Producer Natalie Jennings.

What resulted is a tool that is more complex than the otherwise simple menu bar would indicate. Click on a candidate and you can see how often they are mentioned on Twitter relative to other Republican primary candidates and President Obama.

But wait, there’s more.

“We keep talking about Twitter, but we’re also counting Trove,” said Haik of the Post-acquired company that brings in more than 10,000 publications, targeting them to users’ preferences. “So, that’s an awesome win there.”

Jennings reports on the @MentionMachine data regularly, mining it to help inform the Post’s journalism. ”The daily data is proving itself,” said Haik, “and doing that reporting is a big part of the machine. It’s not just the numbers.”

The @MentionMachine has a profanity filter, but tweets with profanity are counted among the candidates’ mentions.  Try to get any more specific than that, and you run into what Haik calls “a special sauce” — the programming muscle that powers @MentionMachine. Haik says she and others refer to it as a combination of Twitter, her own unique innovations, and the execution engine Kangaroo.  

Registered voters are not given preference, since @MentionMachine does not target those in the U.S. or provide U.S. geotagged tweets any additional weight. @MentionMachine does, however, feature “Top Tweets” — or tweets that are considered to be driving the conversation about a particular candidate at the given moment. “We have a very unique formula algorithm for top tweets, it’s not just retweets,” said Haik, emphasizing that there are safeguards in place against individuals trying to game the system.

“We’re making sure that our top tweets are tweets that are driving the conversation,” she continued, “So, the point is we’re trying to show people exactly where people are spiking and when.”

The Post is not the only organization trying to mine what has come to be known as “big data” when it comes to the 2012 election. CNN debuted a similar Twitter tracking tool on Iowa caucus night, and other Web sites are drawing from the Twitter API data pipeline as well. Regardless of what others are doing, Haik said she’s confident that @MentionMachine has carved a unique place for itself as a transparent tool able to provide journalistic value. “We tried to make the machine programatically do some journalism for us,” she said.

While @MentionMachine shows candidate mentions, Haik is often asked about sentiment data — or whether a tweet or media mention can be classified as falling into one or more emotional categories, such as sarcasm, anger, sadness, and joy. “Sentiment data’s not there yet,” said Haik, “I don’t feel like you have to have sentiment data to get a good read on where the
conversation is on a person.”

The @MentionMachine is by no means static. It is continually tweaked and improved. “I’m calling it a very mature prototype,” said Haik. She provided a preview of one impending change: “What you’re going to see next week is when you hover over that spike tweet, you’re going to get that exact top tweet for that moment.”

Read more about @MentionMachine and explore the data.

The Washington Post’s new Primary Tracker, created by Kat Downs, Ted Mellnik and Karen Yourish of The Post’s Graphics Department, is a one-stop shop for keeping up with the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

The interactive graphic features the newly-finalized primary schedule, state visits by candidate, and historical data from previous GOP presidential primaries. The tracker pulls state visits from PBS NewsHour’s political calendar and aggregates the data by state and candidate. Live results for each primary will be available as they happen.

Next Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET, The Washington Post and Bloomberg will hold the first Republican presidential debate to focus on a single issue: the economy.

The candidates will assemble at Dartmouth to talk social security, the national debt, health care, taxes and jobs. They will repeat well-rehearsed talking points, try to zing their opponents, and convince voters that their proposals qualify them to win the White House. 

But these debates generally contain few surprises. The candidate who can keep to their talking points without tripping over questions tends to “win.” But what about what the candidates don’t say? What about larger political questions that go unaddressed? What about fact-checking?

As we get geared up for Tuesday’s debate, we are partnering with Quora to get help tackling the questions that might otherwise go unanswered, starting off with Wonkblog’s Ezra Klein.

jdavidake:

Live photo of live Presidential TV address.

Yesterday The AP (AP) shot the televised Presidential address to the nation. That wouldn’t be news except it’s never happen before. At least no one can remember it ever happening. In the past still photographers were escorted into the room after the televised speech. The President might reread part of the speech for the still photographers or he might just stare at them. This tradidtion dates back at least to the Truman administration when President Truman would read his speech first for radio and then again for the noisy newsreel and still cameras. The issue preventing shooting the live address has always been the sound of the shutters and the movement of the still photographers. Not anymore.

More background how this changed and why can be found here: http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2011/06/potus_speak.html

This is a quick look at how we did it. The first frame is a Canon 5D Mark II all wrapped up in a soft sound dampening blimp.  We mounted the camera on a tripod under the main television camera and using live view mode tripped the shutter with a hard-wired cable from across the room while the President spoke.  The rig was completely silent.

The second frame is the President’s view of the rig from the podium.

The photographer in the room firing the camera was Pablo Martinez Monsivais. You can see him in the third frame. He wasn’t allowed to move during the speech so he shot the 45 degree angle and tripped the remote camera from this position.

The last frame is the final product from the remote camera. 

Times they are a changin’… 

(Source: paid2see)