Addiction to political reporting and coverage...
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post has an interesting article up today that dissects the new 24/7 news cycle that we find ourselves in. Now, when I was a strategist in the pre-2000 years, there was a flow to the news cycle that let everyone catch their breath and refocus their message in a daily routine that gave some structure and sanity to the process. However today as Howard explains, with blogs, cable news showing stump speeches, campaign conference calls, text of speeches before they're given, YouTube as a commercial distribution outlet and everything else associated with this new news cycle, political coverage has taken on a life of it's own. This has led many major news organisations question even sending reporters on the road with candidates due to the cost of such compared with the lack of "scoops" since all the blogs have already covered those "scoops" before the reporters even have a chance to type them up. When you combine that with another article out today in the NYTimes talking about some people's addiction to that constant news cycle and need to keep up with it, a question begins to peek through the clutter: Are we better off today than in previous election cycles when there was more a structure and balance between the on/off switch of political news coverage? Frankly, I don't know... but I do know that we aren't going backwards so people better gets used to it.
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