After Colin Powell endorsed Senator Barack Obama for president on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last month, the video was published online within minutes. In this case, it wasn’t posted on YouTube. Rather, the network’s online sister, MSNBC.com, showed the video hours before many television viewers could watch the interview for themselves.
Even the old media, apparently, can learn a few new-media tricks.
Just as Fox News changed the country’s ideas about cable news in the 1990s, this election may go down as the one in which new technologies and platforms forever changed the ways campaigns are fought and consumed.
When viewers sit down to watch the returns, they can also check text messages for alerts, surf polling sites for exit results and watch video sent to them by the campaigns. For many, the dividing line in the 2008 election between online and off, broadcast and cable, pop culture and civic culture was all but obliterated.
But as shown by NBC’s decision to post the Powell clip quickly, the networks have not sat still. Instead, they have made specific efforts to engage audiences with interactive features, allowing their content to be used in unanticipated ways and breaking out of the boundaries of the evening newscast.
“Old media outlets — the networks, the newspapers — learned a lot of lessons from the last cycle and didn’t allow others to own the online space this time,” said Rick Klein, a senior political reporter for ABC News.
Some of those lessons have been painful ones. Consider what has changed since the last presidential election. Four years ago, the network news operations were still the go-to source on election night, with a total audience of 38 million, compared with 17 million for the three cable news channels.
This year, Fox News and CNN outperformed two of the broadcast networks during…