Great post and thanks for starting this conversation.

Can you elaborate on some of the past attacks on campaign bloggers? None of the others stick out in my mind. Are they usually behind the scenes? Are they intraparty or from the right?

My sense is that there is a new emerging structure within campaigns. Increasingly the lines between "Communications" and "Online Operations" is blurring .

Blogging is becoming a more pure communications function. In many cases, especially on campaigns, it's about being a "hype man" for good clips, serving as a dumping ground for policy news and research, and initiating a rapid response. Netroots coordinating is a subset function of this.

Email copy writing is increasingly interdisciplinary between fundraising and communications.

Internet Operations is either being outsourced wholly, or for big-budget campaigns, a small salad bowl in-house "technology" people deals with the actual production side of things, and usually gets to be the victim of the fluctuating demands of other departments.

I think you are right on target here Matt.

The 'campaign blogger' or 'internet director' or 'netroots coordinator' is part of the communications team for a campaign. Depending on the nature of the campaign they are senior staff and integral to every action taken or they are the next step down.

Every candidate for federal office, statewide office, and most other state level offices should have someone filling that role. In some areas this may remain a second tier position in the campaign but that will change and grow over the next couple cycles.

Even local candidates can benefit from an aggressive and well thought out internet outreach campaign.

If you are official staff for a candidate then you are official staff for the candidate. Everything you say can and will be used against your candidate in the court of public opinion. Act accordingly.

In this last cycle I was an unofficial netroots coordinator for a candidate. This allowed me a little more leeway. I was not paid staff. I was not official staff. But I volunteered to fill that role unofficially and since the campaign did not hire anyone to officially fill it that meant it was up to me.

This left me with a little more room to speak for myself or cover issues personal to me but not much. Every step of the way I had to consider how my words would reflect on my candidate. That was a self policing job that I understood implicitly. As a result I refrained from commenting on many things. I refrained from writing on some topics. I wrote on others in a way that reflected my candidates views rather than necessarily my own.

Similarly, I was ready at hand with responses to any attacks on my candidate by way of attacking me, my words, my outside associations, or previous actions. In the local newspaper blog I was attacked on a daily basis in a manner intended to smear my candidate. My candidate was attacked for similar associations. Half of my daily job was to have ready response to these attacks to defuse and disarm them. It is no mistake that Matt listed "smear patrol" as the first order of business.

At the same time I also had to listen to what was being said and give my candidates official staff a heads up on what might be coming their way. Ambushes and the like. I also asked for position statements when I saw concerns raised in other areas that might eventually be directed at my candidate so that I'd have that ready response when they came.

Like you Matt, I am very surprised at how poorly prepared the Edwards staff was for this. Their eventual response was good, not great, but good enough. The attack from the right was not surprising. It was in fact very predictable. The lack of preparedness from the campaign is the big surprise in all of this. Other campaigns should take note and be prepared.

Bottom line is that bloggers can provide a very valuable resource to campaigns but if you are a blogger and intend to move into campaigning then you need to realize that it is a professional level job and needs to be treated accordingly. The campaign looking to hire needs to vet the potential employee and the employee needs to vet themselves in preparation for the attacks and let the campaign know where they may come from.

Lastly, I received a lot of compliments from people for the patience and moderation I showed in handling the many personal attacks that came my way. It is an absolute MUST for a campaign blogger to be able to moderate their own emotions and ensure their comments and responses are professional. If you have a thin skin or prefer to shoot first and think later then you are not cut out for the job.

Peace,

Andrew

I think this is a good list, but I think it's a little light on the ways the Internet folks work with field. I think utilizing online support in the offline world more efficiently and innovatively will be a big facet of '08. More than just Facebook networking and "meetups" ...

Also, as the use of video grows, I think integrating a truly multimedia information stream will be a big part of what the online communications folks will need to be doing, and it's a uniquely online process/challenge.

Basically, the online team is going to have to synthesize the activities and messages of all the other parts of the campaign, while creating a new, multimedia information stream. It'll be increasingly difficult to separate "Internet" communications, fundraising, and field from their offline counterparts.

Matt,

I agree with you that the Edwards' camp didn't anticipate the smears by doing the oppo research (distasteful as it may be) to see them coming.  I think this is a mark lack of preparation in one facet of the campaign, but I do want to emphasize that it is not a flaw that should mark the Edwards Campaign as unworthy.

I would ask any fair minded Democrat to look at both campaigns' websites.  Look at the main pages.  Look at the blog page.  Tell me which campaign is dealing more with issues, and allows people a chance for their voices to be heard.  Which is the rah-rah site, and which one is actually built for organization?

The Edwards people had a flaw in an otherwise superior structure.  No person or campaign is perfect.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that Edwards 2008 is Howard Dean the sequel.  I think you have a lot of people who were in the Dean camp, the technically savvy and passionate, who have latched on to the Edwards wagon this time.  In 2004, the Edwards Web presence was kind of a Windows Campaign-in-a-box site.  Now it's a much more customized Linux based one.

I get the idea that the Edwards people were looking at what they could do, not what could happen to them. Hopefully they are doing both now.

I worked as the campaign blogger (Online/Blogosphere Outreach Coordinator) for the Christine Jennings campaign down here in Sarasota.

This model seems pretty good.  I would add just a brief note:

Netiquette is critical for a campaign blogger, as is familiarity with the site policies of each blog where posting is done.  On a campaign blog the rules are a little simpler: be upfront about who penned each entry and never misrepresent authorship--if the candidate didn't write (or at least sign off on) an entry, don't attribute it to them.

On a non-campaign blog like MyDD or dKos, which is where the majority of your readership is likely to find you, you're going to have to surrender any anonimity.  Post under your real name (if you're on paid staff, you'll likely be in FEC reports, anyway).  If you start a fresh campaign account on a site where you post personally, make certain that you don't engage in sockpuppetry, even accidentally--it's a sign of disrespect to the community.  The author of any post under a campaign account should post their real name and job title at the end.

You're absolutely right about the importance of content management and coordination with the communications director.  None of my posts on the Jennings campaign were posted without prior consultation with communications.  While I chose the topic and wrote everything myself, I wouldn't want to write something off-message enough or inflammatory enough to hurt the candidate or the campaign, so even though I signed everything I wrote with my own name, I made sure it wouldn't interfere with the campaign's communication strategy.  Any blog post you write or email you send is fair game for reporters (we had a bit of a situation on this last campaign after a throwaway line in a fundraising email was picked up by a local political reporter and became the message that the press went with that say).

Just remember--you're speaking on behalf of the campaign to a valuable constituency, one which can fact-check instantaneously and enforce accountability.  Don't take the blogosphere for granted, and behave like a polite member of a community.

-JR Lentini

Matt,
   this is pretty off-topic, except in that it relates to blogger self-defence. And so:
 do you, Chris, Nancy, etc. have health insurance. While I'm fully behind univ. health care, I also am impressed by what the freelancer's union has been able to do for its members health insurance-wise
 www.freelancersunion.org/insurance -home/?SGLSESSID=29480f6385adf719f109fbb 60e84ba45&1)

I assume that many bloggers would fit the "freelance" label; and while their rates are fairly high still, it seems plausible that blog attention could be helpful as far as future rate negotiation, etc.

Just a thought, anyway.

Matt,

I wondering the extent to which the four roles (which make sense to me) are going to remain the responsibility of one person on presidential campaigns. As I see it, those four tasks were split between Marcotte and McEwans. I don't see any scenario in which the blogger branch of an online communications team stays in the hands of one person. Or if it does, it comes at the expense of the campaign.

Once campaigns recognize that not only do they need to have someone bottom-lining these four areas, the recognition that getting multiple people focusing intensely, exclusively on these task will follow.

What this posts makes tremendously clear is that a campaign must have their blog operation in order or else it becomes a liability. Roles have to be defined. Communication structures have to be established. Decision-making empowerment must be clear. Perhaps most importantly of all, at least some representative of the blogger-staff on a campaign must be given a seat at the campaign's communication strategy table.

If there is a blog concern, it must be addressed as a campaign wide communications concern. The lesson from the Marcotte/McEwan incident is that the Right and the press are more than willing to make personnel issues regarding bloggers matters of national attention. Campaigns must prepare accordingly.

--Matt Browner Hamlin

Note: Amanda and Melissa will be my guests onHeading Left's Blog Talk Radio show on Monday at 11am EST, call in at (646)652-4803 to join the discussion.

This whole kerfluffle was baffling and infuriating to me. From the beginning I never understood why Amanda wanted to leave Pandagon to blog for Edwards nor why the Edwards campaign wanted Amanda as their blogger.

Amanda leaving Pandagon to blog for Edwards is a bit like the late Molly Ivins giving up writing her column to do press for Hillary -- a big waste! Amanda writes pointed, opinionated, viciously satirical and clearly controversial commentary. Anyone with any familiarity with her writing would know that she would need to be defanged if not muzzled entirely in the role of campaign blogger.

My worry was that she would kind of fade away into the kind of boring "the candidate was at (insert boring early state event here) and his message of blah blah blah really resonated with the fine voters of Des Moines/Manchester/Las Vegas/Charleston" stuff that campaign bloggers have to write and Pandagon would limp along without her.

Instead she became the story and a lightening rod for criticism and outright thuggery from the right wing. The progressive blogosphere circled the wagons and everyone came out looking bad.

I'm looking forward to having her on my "radio" show on Monday and calling her out on one or two things.

Amanda made two comments in her recent Salon piece that really caught my eye:

My main concern about the relationship between my personal blog and the campaign blog was that I wouldn't have enough time to keep my personal blog updated as frequently as the readers had come to expect, a problem I solved by inviting other bloggers to join. I thought some about content concerns, but my opinion had always been that bloggers who work for campaigns should feel free to have personal blogs, so long as they disclosed their employment to their personal blog readers and refrained from using their personal blogs to bash other candidates.

"Reasonable people," I thought, "can tell the difference between a personal blog post and those I'll write for the campaign." What I naively failed to understand was that there is no relationship between what reasonable people think and what will be used in a partisan bout of mud-slinging.

Notice that her first concern is about her personal blog instead of the candidate. As a campaign hack I find that deeply offensive. Staffers get a lot of shit on the blogs and elsewhere and that's our role. We serve the candidates we believe in and sacrifice ourselves. If you're not thinking about the candidate first, you're not doing your job.

The second thing that stuck out is her "reasonable people" comment. Naive! Campaigns are not polite discussions between reasonable people. They are brutal affairs -- especially primaries -- and your candidate's opponents will happily leap on any opportunity to twist your words against your candidate. Clearly Amanda didn't see the shit storm coming. The Edwards campaign should have and should have been prepared to protect themselves.

The other comment that bothered me was this one:

What I also failed to understand was how much McEwan and I would stick out. I was aware that I didn't exactly fit the image people have of bloggers who join campaigns -- the stereotype being 30-something nerdy young white men who wear khakis and obsess over crafting their Act Blue lists. I wasn't aware that not fitting the image would attract so much negative attention. In fact, I mostly saw this all as a baby step in the direction of diversity, since McEwan and I differed from the stereotype mostly by being female and by being outspoken feminists.

It's true that the majority of campaign bloggers have been white males but Zephyr Teachout with Howard Dean and MyDD's Nancy Scola, my former colleague at Mark Warner's PAC, certainly never became the story themselves. Amanda may want to take pride in being an outspoken feminist, but a campaign operative's job is to help the candidate not speak out. Blaming sexism is pretty lame in my opinion. Amanda didn't "differ from the stereotype mostly by being female," she differed from the stereotype by not understanding her role on the campaign.

And her comment about obsessing over ActBlue lists is also insulting. Obsessing about online fundraising is a huge part of the job of a good campaign blogger. We're in this to help good candidates win elections, not earn cool points.

Amanda is a good to great opinion blogger, but I think she washed out as a campaign pro for a number of reasons, not all of them Bill Donohue's fault.

Amanda and I are IRL ("in real life") friends from Austin, TX so I'm looking forward to having a no-bs conversation with her on Monday at 11am EST. Call (646)652-4803 and share your take of the whole thing with Amanda, Melissa, my co-host James Boyce and I on Monday.

This is pure speculation, but my own theory is that the reason that Amanda wasn't "vetted" is because she wasn't necessarily chosen by Matt Gross. The primary force for her hiring was probably Elizabeth Edwards.

There's been a load of commentary in the letters section over at Salon in response to Amanda's article that bloggers should never work on campaigns. Yours is the first comment anywhere not only defending but describing what a campaign blogger's job should be. I'm going to clip your 4 bullet points and quote them there because I think it would be valuable to that discussion.

Thank you for the insightful post. I've been really disappointed with this part thus far in the campaign cycle:

They must also communicate with the larger universe of bloggers who have interest but not allegiance to your candidate, providing them with information they find helpful and open discourse.

I was initially quite excited when I saw that one of the front-runner's website's had a special way to register "as a blogger." Cool, I thought, they're going to treat me like a psuedo-journalist, right?

Wrong. The first communication I got from them was a fund-raising appeal. They falsely assumed my interest was actually allegience.

I want to be on mailing lists for press releases, not fund-raising appeals. That should be simple to specify. Instead, they just annoyed me. By treating me like an ATM, they've blown a golden chance to get their word out in a sympathetic outlet.

[I didn't mentioned the specific campaign on purpose... it's still early, I'm open to them getting it right eventually.]

Help Keep Wild, Wonderful, West Virginia Blue

I keep thinking about a couple West Wing episodes featuring C.J. Craig as press secretary.

One, how she said that next to the President she was the most recognizable face of the administration.

And the other about the flak jacket that press secretary's passed on one to another.

I am no longer associated with the campaign I worked for in '06 yet many people still see me as a public face of it. Even now that I am not working for the candidate I am aware that I have an on-going responsibility to in some degree represent that candidate and not do anything to harm them.
 

Matt Gross, Peter Daou, Joe Rospars, Dan Gerstein, you...

Aren't you leaving a little something out of your analysis?  Amanda Marcotte very explicitly stated in Salon that her gender was a huge part of this smear:

_
One question that's hard to avoid is how much of the venom had to do with the fact that McEwan and I were young women entering into a field (Internet communications) that's viewed as almost monolithically masculine. From my vantage point, it appeared that sexism was one of the primary motivating energies behind the campaign. Even before Donohue stepped in, various right-wing bloggers were obsessed with my gender and sexuality. As I noted at the time of my resignation, the majority of the hate mail I was receiving was from men, and almost all the e-mails made note of my gender or suggested that I would be a more pleasant woman if I wasn't so "angry." Bluntly put, I find it hard to believe that many men would end up being denounced on TV for using words like "fuck" or "cunt" on their blog and expect to receive piles of e-mail offering an opportunity to suck the sender's dick.
___

The fact is that the "Edwards brush" will never touch male bloggers because when they blog for campaigns AND their personal sites they aren't seen as "cavalier," "unprofessional," operating "as if their personal expressive needs mattered at all" or "naive" as Texan Nate put it.  

The reason Amanda became the story was precisely because of her gender and her feminist views, not because she was "unprofessional" or made it so!  

It's astounding the how naive Amanda and the Edwards campaign were on this.

This an age of brutal political conflict chiefly because the stakes are so high.

Global warming...

Global warfare...

The deliberate, for profit, destruction of the environment...

The end of life on this planet as we know it?

Frankly, as a veteran of first wave and second wave feminism I can't get to worked up about Amanda and her sensitivity.

And before ya start swallow big cup of STFU! I participated in the IRS/Catholic League blogswarm and I'd cheerfully run over any one of Malkin's Monkeys with my truck if I got the chance. I just think there were waaaaaaaay better choices than Amanda for this post. Someone with a lower profile for a start. For I agree that if there is to be such a thing as a 'campaign blogger' them their job is to promote the candidates virtues and policies. Not their own.

I just wonder if we in the blogosphere are smart as we think we are...

This episode does not seem to indicate that we are.

I will cheerfully hold my breath until the end of Karl Rove politics-but that's only because I'm an idealist and a glutton for punishment.  The right lives for the faux outrage, the victimization, Rove has mined that for gold his entire career.  In the meantime there is no low that will not be sunk too, remember the roll of "Jeff Gannon" in the winnning campaign against Tom Daschle?  Rovian politics knows where to look because they have been there first.  With so much at stake it seems flippant to call it the rules of the game, but campaign bloggers have to respect the rules of the game or real damage can be done to good candidates, this older/sadder/wiser campaigner has not had the pleasure of working for the real thing nearly as often as she would have liked.  My own words in the past would haunt me so let me reoffend-the ladies should have known better-Donahue is a sack of shit, but he plays his sack of shit game well.  You can do three things, protect yourself (so as to protect your campaign), fight back fast and hard (risk your candidate), or don't play with fire (they don't fight fair-surprise).

I think the roles laid out in this post match up with the hats I wear in my job, though I would include the fundraising department along with communications and field.