“Neil” and “Kate” are both former officials from the Prime Minister’s Office who worked under Tony Blair during the closing years of his premiership and then for a period under Gordon Brown when he took over as prime minister in 2007. Neil tells me about the power of the traditional press officers inside Number 10 and the broader Labour Party. While Labour occupied Number 10, the press officers were risk-averse veto players who had the power of sign-off over all media activity: “So it was quite a battle with press. That was evident straight away. Everything we wanted to do, we had to talk to press about it. And as press people are, they were very conservative about taking risks.” In those days, there were clear boundaries between the small group of three or four individuals working on new media projects at Number 10 and the prime minister’s larger press team, not to mention the broader legions of press officers in the Cabinet Office. Neil speaks of the “old structure set up in ’97 that was there to service traditional media, quite rightly, and that was what worked.” But this structure strongly influenced the approach to online media. The website became dominated by “a collection of press releases … that were only useful for certain types of people—journalists” (Interview 19, June 2010).
During the final year of Blair’s premiership, the emphasis shifted somewhat, as a new experimental culture began to develop at Number 10, driven in large part by Ben Wegg-Prosser, who became Blair’s Director of Strategic Communications. Wegg-Prosser led a small team that introduced the Downing Street e-Petitions site and launched the prime minister’s YouTube channel, the first of its kind in the world for a government head. Wegg-Prosser was quite close to Blair and convinced him that online engagement might be used strategically by Number 10. But the reasons behind this are revealing. As Neil explains, “I think he understood that the press goes in new media’s favor also. If we do something good, the press picks up on it and it becomes a story and that happened with the YouTube thing” (Interview 19, June 2010). Kate, meanwhile, explains that the decision to start promoting Number 10 on the web stemmed from a desire to “see some level of control” over messaging in the hostile media environment that characterized the late period of Blair’s premiership and almost the entirety of Brown’s: “Basically, the theory became, that with media fragmentation, that everyone’s a publisher … you might as well try and take control of the media, and become a primary source” (Interview 3, April 2010). In this approach, self-publishing via online media comes to be seen as a means of bypassing an increasingly truculent broadcast and newspaper media. Revealingly, Kate on several occasions uses the term “broadcasting” to describe what they were trying to achieve with the changes to the Number 10 website from 2007 onward.
The Number 10 YouTube experiments were often amateurish. Neil tells the story of how, when professional filmmakers were in Downing Street shooting other footage, Blair mocked the new media team’s “rubbish little video camera.” Some of Number 10’s videos nevertheless struck a chord and had the desired effect with older media, such as Blair’s French-language video congratulating Nicolas Sarkozy upon his election as French president in May 2007. Kate explains how this changed traditional press officers’ views of the internet inside Number 10:
Then people like David Hill, who at first was very doubtful about this—and I don’t mean this pejoratively—but where a man of his generation kind of got it—is on that holiday weekend, when we did this Sarkozy thing, we were second on the BBC teatime news, with the medium and the message: “Blair’s got a YouTube channel, Blair’s congratulating Sarkozy.” Now, Blair congratulating Sarkozy wouldn’t merit a mention on any TV news without that mechanism. So then they kind of understood that we were having control and we were having impact and there was a ripple effect from what we were doing (Interview 3, April 2010).
While press officers were still resistant, due to what they saw as the inherently risky nature of online political communication, they were now able to see benefits in terms they more clearly understood. Brown’s press team also understood the power of the political bloggers, Kate says, but only because these were perceived as simply an extension of the political gossip networks of the Westminster village. This was the press officers’ way of integrating the internet into their practice. But it is clear that they were not interested in online engagement for any other reason. Instead, they sought to use the internet to try to place positive stories about the prime minister on television and radio.
A certain logic of integration has thus emerged. Elite politicians, their press staff, and their special advisers can see online communication working when it gets them mainstream media coverage on television, radio, and in newspapers. The online communications staff seem happy because these stories invariably highlight their innovative use of the internet. When this logic falls apart, as it did when an online petition protesting government plans to introduce a national road charging scheme quickly secured 1.7 million signatures on the Downing Street e-Petitions website in 2007, the press officer “firing squad,” as Kate describes them, “line[d] up” to insist that the “measure of success is the message” (i.e., not the medium) and that they should not just make the news because “we’re doing something online” (Interview 3, April 2010). The risks on that occasion were seen as too great. The government quickly abandoned its road-pricing scheme and the online petition was the cause, though this was never publicly admitted (Interview 3, April 2010).
When Gordon Brown took over from Blair as prime minister in 2007, the experimental phase inside Number 10 wound down and Brown employed his own team of communications staff. Wegg-Prosser and several others left and new personnel arrived, such as Damian McBride, who became a special adviser to Brown and handled much of media relations. This period saw the intensification of the tactical approach to online media. The new team continued with the attempts to use YouTube for what they thought would be headline-grabbing interventions that would put Brown in a positive light. The “nadir” of this approach, as Kate describes it, was what became known simply as the “Countdown video.” Countdown is a long-running, moderately popular, but low-budget British daytime television quiz show that celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2007. Like other daytime television shows, it has something of an ironic “cult following” among the young. McBride had the idea to make a Downing Street YouTube video featuring Brown congratulating Countdown on reaching this milestone. The new media staff were opposed but they were overruled by McBride. The result was something of a minor disaster. Brown delivered an extraordinarily wooden speech direct to the camera, in which he reminisced over the show’s contribution to British national culture. The video fell flat and the sense emerged that these “softer” online forms of communication exposed Brown to ridicule by professional political journalists who liked nothing better than new hooks for stories about the government’s attempts to influence their coverage. As a consequence, Brown’s team put “digital way down the pecking order” and in the run-up to the 2010 poll went “back to the old ways” of targeting elite journalists with stories that they wanted to be placed in friendly newspapers (Interview 3, April 2010). In 2009, the “Smeargate” affair saw it emerge that McBride and another Labour adviser, Derek Draper, had been planning to launch a new “gossip blog” called Red Rag that would publish details of the private lives of leading Conservatives. This episode, which led to Damian McBride’s resignation from Number 10, was a signal of the colonization of the new media strategy by the “old ways” of spin and misinformation that had plagued the Labour government’s dealings with the media since it first came to power in 1997.
Still, this tactical approach is understandable if we consider the other forces at play. It should come as no surprise that political journalists often respond with derision to government’s attempts to use digital media tactically, not least because they wish to protect their status as gatekeepers. Bill, a senior official in the cabinet office, revealed how, in his experience, journalists become unhappy if news is released via Twitter or a
blog post rather than a formal press release. This happened during the launch of a new website and a new initiative to release government data in 2010, for example: “we launched with a single tweet … that was the only breaking of the news … and we had complaints from the press that we’d announced something without a press release!” (Interview 11, May 2010).
“Joined-Upness”
Despite these significant conflicts between the norms of older and newer media logics inside government and the Labour party, and despite Mary’s moderate dismay about the prevalence of tactical online campaigning inside Labour’s communications team, her distinction between tactical and strategic integration of the internet can only take us so far in understanding the party’s approach to communication. This is because, in Mary’s perspective, a strategic approach to the internet is defined mainly in terms of the contribution it makes to the ground campaign. There is, however, a good deal of evidence from these interviews that if strategy is understood in a more expansive sense, a strategic set of norms is indeed emerging. Much of this revolves around the ongoing integration of internet and broadcast media campaigning, and this is occurring on lines that are strikingly similar to those I discussed in relation to the American campaign context in chapters 6 and 7, and I will discuss in chapter 10.
For Labour, this process began around 2007, when the mobile web took off and MPs, cabinet ministers, and their press staff and special advisers started to use social media. Mary suggests that smartphones made the web appealing to those among the Westminster elite who have staff to process their paperwork and who are “on the go all day” as they move between meetings, television studios, and parliamentary debates. The online team began asking senior politicians to use their television and radio appearances as opportunities to point the public to their websites. As part of this approach, Labour started to use a variety of new “microsites” tied to specific single-issue campaigns spearheaded by individual cabinet ministers. Two good examples are the “Ed’s Pledge” site and “Back the Ban.” Ed’s Pledge was designed to tie in with then climate change secretary Ed Miliband’s activities in the run-up to the 2009 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Back the Ban was launched in 2009 but was given a boost in February 2010 when environment secretary Hilary Benn organized the mass online signing of a letter to David Cameron asking him to drop his party’s opposition to the ban on fox hunting. As Mary says: “That’s something we’ve spent a lot of time working on. One of the things that we kept saying was this online stuff only works if it’s integrated with offline … We did do a lot of work with the press officers and with ministers themselves to say if we are launching a campaign you need to promote it offline. … It wasn’t perfect but that was definitely where we trying to get to in terms of joined-upness” (Interview 21, June 2010). These microsites were also useful for harvesting e-mail addresses from those who might be drawn into the party’s orbit on a single issue but less likely to join as a dues-paying members.
During the 2010 campaign itself, Labour put its own inflection on the real-time integration of broadcasting and social media, a process that, as I show above, was also prioritized by the Conservatives. Labour “spent a lot of time thinking, in the run-up to the election, that the television debates were going to be really important and how we could maximize that online” (Interview 21, June 2010). Party staff established a social media dashboard on the main Labour website during each live televised debate, with the aim of harnessing the energy of those who Mary describes as “dual-screening”; watching the debate on their televisions while simultaneously engaging with others in social media environments using a smartphone, tablet, or laptop. The goal was to provide a common pool of information and opinion on what was said during the debates in the hope that this would prove useful for party activists as they went back to their constituency work the next day. There was also the hope that party members would be able to forward links and opinion from the online dashboards to their family and friends soon after each debate. At the same time, the party’s research and policy units were on Facebook and Twitter during the debates, pushing out rapid rebuttals and reinforcements to journalists in real time as the debates progressed, under the heading “Get the Facts.” A real-time media war room was established specially for each debate and this accompanied the frenzy of interaction among politicians, party staff, and journalists that I documented in chapter 4.
This did not always run smoothly: Mary speaks frustratedly of many senior politicians failing to sign off on news releases, even individual tweets, quickly enough for them to have impact in the real-time news environment. Unlike the Conservatives, Labour has rules that strongly discourage back-room staff from being named in press releases, so they were unable to adopt the strategically informal approach to social media at which the Conservatives’ central office staff excelled. Frustrations also arose due to what were often still-entrenched divisions of labor among the senior press team and the new media team. It is clear that the press officers were the gatekeepers when it came to interacting with journalists. New media staff briefed journalists, but only with the approval of the press officers. And then there were the big unscheduled television moments of the campaign, such as Sky News’s recording of Gordon Brown’s supposedly “off-mic” comments about his awkward encounter with voter Gillian Duffy on the streets of Rochdale. As Mary says, “You have to master the grid, you have to master the agenda. And then if you know you’re master of the agenda and you know you’ve got a story on Friday that is campaignable and is something you can be successful online about, then you can get ready … but unless you’re mastering it in old media you can’t master it in new media” (Interview 21, June 2010).
I turn, finally, to “Mike,” the director of the London office of an international public relations agency. Mike’s agency’s practice exhibits the same tension between tactical and strategic integration of the internet that can be found in Number 10 and the Labour Party, but again, if we push this distinction too far, it starts to dissolve, to reveal an emerging set of practices that strategically blend older and newer media logics.
Around half of Mike’s agency’s clients are progressive political organizations; the rest are companies and other public bodies. The agency has established a reputation for innovation in digital campaigning and it offers clients tools such as mass e-mail databases, a website builder, a fundraising platform, an event planner, an online petition generator, and integration with Facebook and Twitter. But during the interview it soon became clear that much of what Mike’s agency does involves blending online and offline action of various kinds. In common with several of the other domains I cover in this book, a division of labor in media logics is emerging in political public relations.
Mike tends to focus efforts online during the early stages of a campaign, as a means of building a base for future action and harnessing activist enthusiasm. The internet also enables a permanent and intense campaign, one that also allows the leadership to quickly switch emphasis without disorienting their networks of supporters. But during the closing stages of a campaign, Mike says, almost all effort shifts to interacting with broadcast and newspaper media and professional journalists. By the same token, the internet is seen as useful for structuring online activism using petitions, consultations, and social media sharing, yet it is also seen as useful for negative campaigning, or what Mike prefers to call “contrast” campaigning, because “You can put information into the public domain much more easily than you could before—anonymously.” Mike used to feed bloggers stories that he needed to be circulated quickly, and he would recognize that what he sacrificed in terms of simple audience reach he might make up for in virality and speed of circulation. But now, Mike says, he feeds bloggers and journalists in the same way, because if the vast majority of professional journalists are publishing their stories online throughout the day, there is often little point in distinguishing between them and bloggers. By the same logic, when Mike targets broadcast and newspaper journa
lists with pieces of information, he will specifically suggest that a broadcast or newspaper journalist tweet it or mention it in a blog post rather than save it for the television or the next day’s paper.
Thus, Mike’s organization is developing a sense of what is likely to play well across different media, but this is, he says, increasingly driven not by audience size, but by audience type, together with an awareness of the circulatory and amplifying logics of the hybrid media system. He may try to influence a blogger, safe in the knowledge that the blog will also be read regularly by professional journalists. He may ask a professional journalist with a large following on Twitter to tweet a piece of information, safe in the knowledge that online activists will be exposed to it and spread it through interpersonal networks (Interview 16, June 2010).
The Hybrid Media System Page 39
