Web media push for online presidential debate

Ten. That’s the number of candidates running for the French presidency, and the problem of finding a way for all of them to debate together may find a solution online. 

A televised debate on France 2 show “Mots Croisés”  will take place on the 16th of April, but organizing it is harder said than done. François Bayrou insists it is public broadcasting’s role to do so, and smaller candidates like Jacques Cheminade and Nathalie Arthaud said they would come. But Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign only wants a second round debate, François Hollande is still hesitating and Marine Le Pen will come…only if the latter two do.

For an American audience this may be difficult to understand. Didn’t the Republican primaries host a multitude of debates with eight candidates? There are important differences that make it hard to repeat the experience here. All the primary candidates were, by definition, Republicans or conservatives, which meant that despite differences between individual candidates, most of them had the same thinking framework. The French presidential election couldn’t be more different (although, amusingly enough, both Newt Gingrich and Jacques Cheminade share a passion for space travel). The ten candidates span the whole political spectrum, from extreme-right to extreme-left, and getting them to debate in a constructive and clear way is an arduous task.

Then why not forget the smaller candidates that are barely polling in single digits and focus on the main four or five? asks my fictional American audience. In France, CSA regulations (see my previous post for an explanation) make this impossible. All candidates need equal airtime, and favoring candidates is not an option.

WE WANT A DEBAT #ledebat http://t.co/CJKklzUt

— Lise Pressac 🐳 (@LisePressac) April 5, 2012

This is where the web kicks in. CSA regulations don’t apply to the Internet, so organizing such a debate is legal. It would also allow for a much more flexible organization. These past few days Dailymotion, the Parisien.fr, Europe 1.fr, Yahoo! and the Nouvel Observateur.com have joined forces to do just that. In a common statement they wrote:

“In the face of the innumerable difficulties the traditional media are encountering in trying to organize a debate between the main presidential candidates, and to fulfill the voters’ need for information, Dailymotion, Le Lab Europe 1, Yahoo!, Le Nouvel Observateur.com and LeParisien.fr are joining forces to propose a real debate. […]”

They added that the candidates:

“will be able to challenge each other, exchange and debate without constraints, and will be interviewed by young, experimented and talented journalists as well as by web users via social media.”

The Twitter hashtag #ledébat is the rallying point for these web media, who have started contacting candidates on social media, as you can see below:

Candidats, que diriez-vous de débattre sur Internet ? @bayrou @dupontaignan et @MLP_officiel ont dit oui ! http://t.co/mVpsx7n7 #ledebat

— L'Obs (@lobs) April 6, 2012

@fhollande @evajoly @mlp_officiel @philippepoutou Bonjour ! Que diriez-vous d'organiser #ledebat ? http://t.co/ylk77QgE via @LeLab_E1

— Europe 1 (@Europe1) April 6, 2012

Marine Le Pen, Nicolas Dupont Aignan and François Bayrou have already accepted. But while an unrestricted online debate is in the interest of the smaller candidates (as is the televised one, where they get airtime equal to that of their opponents), heavyweights Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande are much more reluctant to jump into a ten-man arena. Both already have the second round in sight, and their campaigns don’t want to get bogged down in such an event, online or off.

Web gives candidates more leeway against campaign restrictions

France has stringent campaign rules, especially when it comes to media coverage, but the web is disturbing this finely tuned framework.

The Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (or CSA, an administrative media watchdog) closely supervises the amount of airtime and coverage each candidate gets, excluding newspapers and magazines from the tally because their influence is seen as weaker than television’s or radio’s. Below (in French) is a graphic that explains how the process is divided up in time before and during the official campaign.

Since last week the ten official candidates have to receive equal airtime and equal speaking time. But what about online content that doesn’t emanate from a traditional media? Contrary to your more traditional election, candidates can now address their electorate directly on the web, without going through the gateways of television, radio or press.

This creates a difficult regulatory situation for the CSA. Candidates have always tried to seize every small occasion to mitigate the effects of equal airtime, by increasing the number of interviews with the local press or using activists on the ground to put up posters and distribute pamphlets. But the web offers unlimited possibilities to not only circumvent CSA regulations through in-house productions (videos, podcasts, etc.) but also to spread these productions online. François Hollande’s campaign recently launched Radio Hollande, a daily podcast. Listen to the first episode below.

Nicolas Sarkozy also launched a mini web-series called “The Experts”, in which UMP personalities are interviewed. Jean-Luc Mélénchon, the Front de Gauche candidate, has had a mini-series for several months. But none of these web initiatives should worry the CSA: so far, their impact is negligible. Sarkozy’s videos garner a few thousand of views at best, as does Radio Hollande. Mélenchon’s web series have a wider following (the last episode was seen over 27,000 times), but the numbers still pale in comparison to the millions one can reach on a television show.

These small initiatives on the web aren’t a real problem for the CSA. The more pressing issue is what will happen when the first preliminary results leak online and possibly influence the vote in cities where polling stations close later. In the 2007 presidential elections numbers were leaked onto Twitter. Back then social media had barely taken off, but Facebook, Twitter and other networks have a massive presence today. Fines and sanctions are planned for those who spread preliminary results online, but it remains to be seen how effective they will be.

French presidential elections get Googled

After the United States, Senegal and Egypt it was France’s turn yesterday to get the official Google election treatment with its own dedicated page for election news and information. I decided to pit the American and French pages one against another to see what the similarities and differences were. On the top is the U.S. election page, on the bottom is the France one (click on the images to zoom in).

 The basic design is very similar: aggregation of news articles in the center, Google + accounts of the candidates on the right, and refined search options (by candidate or theme) on the left.

In green I’ve circled the identical features. Both pages have a specific link towards election coverage on YouTube (which belongs to Google). In both cases the page was created in partnership with a news agency, the Associated Press in the United States and the Agence France Presse in France. However, the former only has a link towards its YouTube election coverage, whereas the latter has an editorial role in selecting the videos that appear on the front page. 

In purple I’ve circled similar features with interesting variations. Both pages feature a refined search sidebar for election themes, but the topics differ between France and the U.S. This minor variation reveals small yet insightful cultural differences. Government spending, for instance, is a topic in the U.S., but is nowhere to be seen on the French page. 

In red, I’ve circled the striking differences between the two Google election pages. There are clearly more features on the U.S. page than there are on the France one. On the bottom, the American page has a selection of trend graphics using Google Insight. The U.S. election page also features an incredibly detailed agenda created using Google Agenda with PBS Newshour, as well as a “Politics & Elections Toolkit” for political professionals (journalists, consultants, etc.).

These differences give the U.S. election page a stronger added value than the French one. The France election page is a sort of  vamped up Google News, but it doesn’t have any features that would push a user to use this page instead of his regular news source. The U.S. election page, on the other hand, offers completely new functionalities and interesting variations on your traditional Google news feed.

Created by a French Google collaborator, the new Google election page for France was launched a few days ago and additional features might not have been unveiled yet. But so far, I think the YouTube Election 2012 page is a much more slick, finished product. Created by YouTube in collaboration with the AFP but also the CFJ (a French journalism school) and Twitter, this YouTube platform boasts an enormous amount of content, fact-checked interviews and social media trends.

You can discover more about the French Google election page and campaigning in the digital era below, with a video of the conference Google held in partnership with France 24 and RFI to launch the new page. France 24 has a recap of the conference here.

Political blogs adapt to social media intensive 2012

Social media is in, blogs are out, according to a recent Rue89 article entitled “RIP: the political blog is a state of clinical death.” The 2012 presidential campaign is supposedly social media oriented whereas the 2007 one relied more on blogs. But even though other news sites have reached similar conclusions, reality is more complicated than the piece suggests.

According to the Wiktionary, a blog is:

A website that allows users to reflect, share opinions, and discuss various topics in the form of an online journal while readers may comment on posts.

In other words, contrary to a social network, a blog is a static website, not a sharing platform. There is, of course, the ability to comment and link to other pages, but a blog does not enable you to share and interact as quickly, easily and seamlessly as social media do. This post considers only political blogs, i.e. blogs by politicians, activists, sympathizers or netizens that deal with politics.

Today, political blogs are at a disadvantage:

– Social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter are much more widespread today than they were five years ago. There were barely 4 million French Facebook users in 2007; today there are nearly 25 million. This means that candidates eager to reach out towards voters online are going to target these social networks first, and that political junkies who used to or still blog have taken to social media to spread their message. Social media are also much more suited to the rapid-fire, back and forth communication wars that campaigns wage against each other. Here are a few examples:

Avec #Hollande le manque de crédibilité c'est permanent !

— Nadine Morano (@nadine__morano) March 14, 2012

(With Hollande, the lack of credibility is permanent!)

Nicolas Sarkozy président du syndicat des riches ce matin sur @f_inter

— Benoît Hamon (@benoithamon) March 1, 2012

(Nicolas Sarkozy president of the rich people’s union this morning on France Inter)

Sarkozy découvre donc que "la moitié des entreprises des CAC 40 ne payaient pas d'impôts sur bénéfices" !! Il était où pendant 5 ans ? #pdc

— Jean-Luc Mélenchon (@JLMelenchon) March 12, 2012

(Sarkozy discovers that “half of CAC 40 companies don’t pay taxes on their profit” !! Where was he the past five years?)

– Pure player (web only) news sites are now firmly established and have copied the blog format. Rue 89 was created right after the second round in 2007, back when neither Mediapart nor the Huffington Post.fr existed. The traditional media wasn’t as interested in blogs, whereas most news sites today have dedicated sections for blogs or host blogging platforms (for instance, the following article on French magazine website L’Express – which also details the decline of blogs in 2012 – was wrote on a dedicated blogging section called Express Yourself ). Journalists, editorialists

But despite these changes, the political blog is not a dying breed. Social web think tank Linkfluence and LeMonde.fr collaborated to create the following cartography of political blogs, which shows how prevalent they still are (click on the image to access the application).

There have been many blogger reactions to the Rue89 article, underlining the democratic virtues of having independent voices online and the importance politicians still grant to blogs, as exemplified by campaigning platforms such as toushollande.fr for Hollande or the “Toile Bleu Marine” for Le Pen, or even individual blogs like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s. This blogger says that only the crème de la crème remain, and that only the political blogs with uninteresting content were weeded out. Another one explains how political blogs may not be as suited for campaigning in the era of social media, but that this does not mean there are obsolete in the long-run.

The over-arching argument is that social media now have better visibility than blogs and are more suited for campaigning, but that political blogs still exist, are complementary to social networks (you promote your blog on Twitter, for instance) and enable longer, more constructed debates. Blogs are also an anchor in the fast-paced world of social media. Tweets and statuses have to be strategically posted to reach an audience less they drown under the onslaught of never ending updates. A blog post follows a less chaotic temporality and is easier to find. It is on her blog, for instance, that a Belgian journalist posted a very critical article on her French colleagues that was then picked up by the French media.

Choose Your 2012 Candidates Online

Gone are the days when you had to peruse pamphlets and scrutinize posters to understand a candidate’s positions and proposals. All of it is online nowadays, and there are several useful web tools for comparing platforms and candidates – some serious, some not. Click on the images below to access the various websites.

• Voxe.org and Rue89 – simple and efficient platform comparators 

Screenshot of platform comparison website Voxe.org

 Created by a team of web specialists (they also created an iPhone app), Voxe.org offers dual comparisons between candidates.

+ : Simple, stream-lined interface with embedded videos. Ability to comment, propose and compare candidates from 2002 and 2007 elections.

– : Some missing information, especially for smaller candidates.

Screenshot of Rue89's platform comparator

News website Rue89 also has its own platform comparator, with fewer details but a quicker interface.

+ : Simple interface with little scrolling, easy access to flagged sources, short title that summarizes each candidate’s position.

– : Only the six main candidates are available for comparison.

• “Qui propose quoi?” (Who is proposing what?) and Présibourse – Having fun with comparisons

Screenshot of Libération.fr's "Qui Propose Quoi?" game

Libération.fr is another news website that helps voters understand what the candidate’s positions are, but in a quizz format.

+ : Quick, ten question sessions with three levels of difficulty enable users to easily find out who is proposing what. Easy to use interface.

– : No possibility of comparing two or more candidates on a specific topic.

Screenshot of Présibourse.fr

Présibourse.fr is not a platform comparator. It does not include any campaign proposals. Instead, it is a betting website where candidates are stock that you can buy and trade.

+ : A fun way of seeing who is popular and who isn’t

– : No comparisons, no real added value other than humor.

Finally, Quivoter.fr and Jevotequien2012.fr are websites for the undecided voter: both ask the user a series of policy questions (ex: What is the most important measure for health and solidarity?). At the end, the test tells you which candidate you are closest to given your answers, and voilà, you know who to vote for!

Geeking the Elysée…On a Bike !

They are on Facebook, on Twitter (here, here and here), on Dailymotion, on Rue89, France TV Info and France Bleu.

And on their bikes.

La Campagne A Velo's itinerary.

La Campagne à vélo (The campaign by bike, or Biking the campaign trail) is a new journalistic initiative that started in February and is co-produced by France Télévisions, Radio France and Playprod in a partnership with Rue89. I have grown particularly fond of La Campagne à vélo because it is one of those rare instances were new technologies and social media are used for journalistic purposes in a refreshing and interesting way.

Two journalists, Raphael Krafft and Alexis Monchovet, are biking around France in order to meet French voters directly in their workplaces and homes until the end of the French presidential campaign in May.  

La Campagne à Vélo's Facebook Page

Instead of merely repeating the same format and distilling the same information across different platforms like many news organizations do, La Campagne à vélo uses each outlet for a specific reason and enables the audience to engage with the information much more seamlessly.

Their Facebook page is the main portal: the two journalists post pictures of their trip, updates on their latest video, radio or written productions and ask for help or tips on their journey (the two bikers have to find a place to sleep every night!). Facebook is a platform where they interact with their audience, answering questions or asking if anybody knows where they can rest for the night. The page also includes a live geo-tracking map of the two journalists’ location.

The different Twitter feeds enable live coverage of the journey, from their own trials and tribulations to the places they go to and the people they meet. Like the Facebook portal, the Twitter feeds also enable user interaction.

Les affiches électorales apparaissent timidement. #miguet et #Melenchon restent en tête #2012avelo http://t.co/SuhrbhoG

— raphael krafft (@RafAvelo) March 1, 2012

(Electoral posters are timidly appearing, Miguet and Mélenchon are ahead)

. @RafAvelo et @AlexAvelo ont quitté Sedan pour rejoindre Charleville-Mézières. Photo vintage en bonus ! http://t.co/aRIuP6L4 #2012Avelo

— La campagne a velo (@CampagneAvelo) March 1, 2012

(Raf and Alex have left Sedan for Charleville-Mézières. Vintage photo bonus!)

Marcel de #Bure: "Mon seul regret dans la vie c est d avoir trop compté mes sous." #2012Avélo http://t.co/rMWfAaOA

— Alexis Monchovet (@AMonchovet) February 15, 2012

(Marcel de Bure: “My only regret is that I counted my money too much)

The interviews and encounters that the journalists have with voters are then packaged into one of three written, audio or video formats and published on one of the partner websites. You can listen and watch the latest audio (an interview with France Bleu Lorraine)  and video (an encounter with French citizens who fled the country for Luxembourg) productions below:

Overall, La Campagne à Vélo is a very strong journalism project because it uses social media (Facebook and Twitter) to interact with the audience and promote quick, live content. It then produces interesting multimedia content across platforms. In essence, it plays with the strengths of different outlets instead of copying the same content across them: social media for interaction and speed, traditional media for summaries and perspectives. Even though there are a minor flaws (most notably, a slight tendency to cover the journalists’ trip itself rather than the voters), this is a format that uses new tools to do an old job: on the ground, door-to-door reporting, directly with the voters.