I continue to follow the exit poll issue with interest (given that we, too, posted the early numbers, with our traditional "GRAIN OF SALT" warning). (For a sense of the MSM tenor, check this pedantic screed by Eric Enberg. Somebody want to fisk that, please?)

Indeed, some of you might have seen our name in the AP story on the issue. As I tried to express to David Baude, the point of interest for us wasn’t just the numbers ... it was that they were out, and that they would soon be everywhere. As I said then:

"I didn't struggle with the decision, because I knew it was going to become a global news item within about 30 seconds. Our approach is: We post, you decide."

That point ... that the democratization of information had made it no longer possible for the media to embargo the information ... has been lost on lots of folks. But today, the Wall Street Journal gets it:

For years TV coverage of Election Day has operated on two levels, one for outsiders and one for insiders. Outsiders wait for the polls to close and the precinct reports to roll in; insiders watch their fellow insiders telegraph what the numbers are saying, usually through dissections of the mood in Camp A or B.

What's changed is that once you had to be a media or political person of a certain minimum altitude to be let in on the secret; now, all you need is a Net connection and rudimentary typing skills. Those who used to have the clubhouse all to themselves have found the door wide open to anyone and everyone. And some of them don't like it.

Which, come to think of it, really is so 1997: Information formerly reserved for a cadre of insiders now spreads more quickly than those insiders can control it. In other words, the middlemen have been eliminated.

Exactly. As I noted to the Associated Press Managing Editors:

Here’s the lesson from Command Post: information in general, and news in particular, is now a flow, and not a stock.

Before the Internet, information was governed by set distribution channels and gatekeepers … brokers … who decided who was able to have what. The stock broker had the price. The real estate agent had the prior housing report. The car salesman had your credit report.

And in news, the journalists had the facts, and the editors acted as brokers, making choices about what would be reported and what wouldn’t.

Not the case now. The Internet hates brokers. It KILLS brokers. Now, because of the Internet, everyone with a computer, an email address and a browser is a point of distribution … the only thing needed for information to “get out” is an interest on the part of one person to supply it, and a demand on the part of another person to have it.

When you have a billion people connected to each other, there is a supply and a demand for everything … and when you have search engines like Google, they actually have the ability to find each other.

This is why technologists like to say that “information wants to be free.” In a connected world, it’s no longer possible to make discretionary choices about what gets reported and what doesn’t.

The Command Post is simply a clearinghouse for news … a medium for the flow … and our contributors enrich that flow with information from a global network of newspapers, radio, TV, direct observation, and emails sent by readers.

So the lesson from the law of the flow: Your ability to choose when and how something is reported, and the timeline over which you can hold information as you make that choice, are more compressed every day. Anyone can spill the beans, and with the web and email, everyone has access to the beans. The important question to ask about a piece of information … and especially highly relevant information … is no longer “if,” it’s "when."

I'm not a professional journalist, nor do I profess to be. But it seems to me that the MSM absolutely must grasp this point. It's no longer "if," it's "when." And if they thought the diffusion of polling data was troublesome this year, wait until they experience 2008.

And what are their choices? Not conduct exit polling? Not likely.

The fact is that the MSM have spent the past several election cycles solving the wrong problem. Rather than finding better ways to obscure the available information until the polls have closed, they should be finding better ways to report an election presuming information transparency while the polls are still open. Because in 2008 the polling data will be out there ... blogs or not.

Posted by Alan at November 8, 2004 08:11 PM | TrackBack