The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  A typical working day at 38 Degrees begins before the team arrive at headquarters. Staff conduct “media checks” and often discuss these checks via e-mail, during the night and in the early morning. If an important news story emerges overnight that fits with 38 Degrees’ underlying progressive agenda, the leadership will then try to construct actions to engage members as quickly as possible. The processes through which actions emerge is therefore based upon the hybrid integration of online and offline media practices, the recalibration of strategy on the basis of perpetual online feedback from members, and a mixture of long- and short-term routines that often revolve around sharing information with other NGOs. 38 Degrees engages in rapid reaction to emerging news agendas, but it is able to do so with legitimacy because it also engages in continuous background research on its members’ views. It exhibits many of the features of the classic single issue “cause” group, but its technological infrastructure allows it to rapidly switch focus from one issue to the next, run campaigns across several issues at any given time, or quickly drop campaigns that do not strike a chord with members. Timeliness is essential to this mode of operation. As Chatterton puts it: “There will be moments when people really care about something, maybe they’ve just seen it on the news and thought, damn I want to do something about that. We hope to be in that moment and make it easy” (Interview 14, May 2010).

  E-mail underpins everything. Each month, the leadership conducts a web poll of one-twelfth of its e-mail list. At the time of my visit, the most recent of these polls had generated over five hundred responses and this was seen as a typical number (Interview 14, May 2010). The aim of the monthly poll is to provide 38 Degrees headquarters with an understanding of issues emerging among its membership base. But the poll also contains a series of tracker questions that can inform adjustments to a campaign as it evolves, as well as a free block of questions that the leaders use to “insert some questions that are just relevant to that time, stuff that we’re particularly concerned about” (Interview 14, May 2010). In addition, the team issues specific polls on campaigns that they would like to see run, or it offers members a set of clear choices on how to approach a particular issue (Interview 15, May 2010). The leadership also “seed” ideas to Twitter and Facebook to get a rough sense of the levels of concern. They harvest comments on their online petitions, analyze them quantitatively, and then use the evidence in broadcast media appearances. Though Babbs expresses ambivalence about the “interview circuit” and recounts the tale of when very favorable coverage on national television news led to “only about 70 people taking an action,” he regularly appears on Britain’s major television and radio news shows (he fielded a call from Radio 4’s PM in the middle of my interview). When he appeared before a House of Lords committee investigating the Digital Economy Bill in 2010, Babbs presented thematically organized aggregated evidence: over twenty thousand comments from those who signed 38 Degrees’ online petition opposing the legislation.

  Volunteers in 38 Degrees’ headquarters continually monitor suggestions sent to them through the organization’s Facebook and Twitter profiles, the website’s contact form, and by e-mail. Campaigns director Hannah Lownsbrough “runs a bit of a filter” on those and then she distributes them to the other team members. The results of all of this are discussed at the weekly staff meeting, where the team take strategic decisions. Actions often emerge from these weekly meetings, but the process is not straightforward. Often members will convey strong opinions in a monthly poll but an action suggested by the leadership will fall flat. Before deciding to “go full-list” to all e-mail subscribers with a new action, the leadership usually sends out test e-mails to just a sample. It then analyzes click-through rates and conducts experiments with subject lines and framing, with the aim of generating more enthusiasm with the e-mail’s next iteration. Sometimes actions continue to fail during testing and are simply abandoned. While this process is reminiscent of older-style campaign message testing in broadcast environments, the timeframes here are sometimes extraordinarily compressed, the matter of only a few hours. The whole ritual is often conducted in real time, as the team click on their automated mass e-mailer (provided by public relations agency Blue State Digital) and watch for the responses and metrics as they flow in. As Chatterton describes it: “It’s fairly rapid. We can see those numbers coming in. When things go really fast you can tell. You can see it going and you think, we’re fine, we can go. If you’re not sure, you need to keep on waiting, and then, if you’re still not sure after two hours, chances are … So we examine what’s gone wrong there. Maybe the subject lines are wrong, maybe the framing was wrong, maybe the e-mail structure was wrong, or maybe there’s another story that just exploded” (Interview 14, May 2010).

  A good example of these micro-cycles of mobilization was the Trafigura affair of October 2009, which has gone down in recent British political history as a victory for freedom of expression over media censorship. The Trafigura affair ended with a successful campaign to overturn a superinjunction forbidding the Guardian newspaper from reporting a question in the House of Commons regarding allegations that a multinational oil trading company had been responsible for the illegal dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. Members of 38 Degrees played an important role alongside the Guardian and other British and Norwegian media organizations in quickly mobilizing a flash campaign of concerned activists focused largely around Twitter. As Chatterton reveals, victory came quickly:

  The Trafigura injunction was very interesting. We came into the office that morning and thought, what is going on here, it’s dreadful being censored in this way. What can we do? We looked around and we couldn’t find out through conventional networks and then Twitter started bubbling up that it was Trafigura. It probably took us about 90 minutes from coming into the office, knowing something had to be done, and getting an action out and starting to test it. And after about 15 minutes after we launched, and we’d had a crisis meeting with the volunteers, we’d all sat around, figured out what to do—the positioning. We got the e-mail ready, got the tech ready, got people writing to their MPs saying “this can’t happen, you’re censoring Parliament as well”—because they weren’t letting people report what was being said in Parliament. And then Trafigura folded, and their lawyers Carter Ruck rescinded the superinjunction and it could be freely reported. That was an incredible two hours for us … . Conventional NGOs couldn’t have responded in that time frame and got that out (Interview 14, May 2010).

  Speed of reaction to emerging news agendas thus plays a hugely significant role in 38 Degrees’ approach to mobilization. When I suggest that this approach might put them at risk of becoming a reactive organization whose goals are defined by the headline writers of the professional media organizations, it sparks some fascinating responses. The team is keen to stress the importance of the ongoing processes of member consultation and testing, the advantages of following the mainstream media’s agenda, and the significance of a particular understanding of authentic representation in contemporary political campaigning.

  The leadership of 38 Degrees argues that campaigns do not simply emerge from the “back of an envelope” on a given day. It is clear that “scenario planning” for different potential outcomes, “power analysis” to determine where to apply pressure, and identifying “members’ concerns” through polling and monitoring of social media takes up a great amount of daily effort (Interview 13, May 2010). Citizen organizations often have very little routine power when it comes to scheduling, particularly in spheres of politics where timeliness is important, such as when legislation enters Parliament, a public figure delivers an important speech, or the editor of a newspaper launches an investigative campaign. Babbs argues that the internet has allowed activists to “catch up with the 24-hour news cycle, which, in the 1990s, politicians had learnt to control” (Interview 15, May). As Lownsbrough puts it: “I, as a citizen, am unable to determine the parliamentary timetable. Not being an editor of a national newspaper, I
am unable to determine what goes on the front page at any given time. But I am able to have an understanding of the fact that on a day when that’s climate change, for example, a substantial number of our members will want to get in on that … . I don’t think that’s allowing other people to set your agenda. I think that’s just being responsive to the circumstances in which we find ourselves” (Interview 13, May 2010).

  It became clear that several of the big campaigns run by 38 Degrees did not emerge from simple reactivity but from a confluence of long-term planning and nimble responses to particular events—being “opportunistic within a strategic framework,” as Babbs puts it (Interview 15, May 2010). A good example is the campaign against cuts at the BBC in 2009 and 2010. This had been identified as an evolving priority but was only fully launched when James Murdoch, who was at that time the News Corp chairman and chief executive, used a high-profile speech to criticize the BBC. “We thought okay, now’s the time. Let’s start,” says Babbs (Interview 15, May 2010). Another example is when 38 Degrees ran a series of newspaper ads calling upon its members to e-mail the Liberal Democrat MPs involved in the coalition talks during the aftermath of the 2010 general election. The aim was to pressure the party into making electoral reform a condition of entering into a coalition with the Conservatives or Labour. As I discuss in this book’s opening vignette (see the Introduction), at that time 38 Degrees was also part of a networked alliance of web-enabled activist campaigns, including Take Back Parliament, Unlock Democracy, Vote for Change, Avaaz, and Power2010. Together, these groups organized a real-space demonstration in front of the nation’s entire broadcast media in central London, just as the coalition talks began in earnest. Babbs live-blogged the demonstration on 38 Degrees’ Facebook page using his smartphone, but he also became enmeshed with television media that day and ended up participating in a hostile interview with Sky News’ Kay Burley that quickly went viral on YouTube.

  But when it comes to reactivity, by far the most intriguing norm I encountered is that, in an era in which the instantaneous communication of ideas via digital technologies is increasingly the expectation, it is the duty of any activist organization to engage with the public on a real-time basis. This is because the reactive, real-time nature of a campaign is important for conveying to the public an organization’s responsiveness and authenticity. Launching quick responses to the daily news agenda is more likely to convey that the leadership are adequately representing their members’ concerns. This is all the more important in the absence of real-space decision-making mechanisms. Lownsbrough: “[We] … communicate with people in a medium which they know and you know to be almost instantaneous … If somebody sends you an e-mail and it doesn’t resonate with what you’re experiencing that day then that feels a bit inauthentic because it’s an instantaneous form of communication. So in the interests of authenticity, when you’re communicating with people over the internet I do think an awareness of what’s happening that day is absolutely critical” (Interview 13, May 2010). Lownsbrough goes on to describe speed as “the contribution that online activism can bring to the activism table” and a force that can restore to those who have become disengaged from politics “some of the excitement that comes from being right in something when the decision’s getting made” (Interview 13, May 2010). Thus, the belief is that reacting to the mainstream media’s news reporting increases the likelihood of successful online mobilization because this will resonate temporally with members’ feelings and provide symbolic rewards. Real-time response is itself a mechanism that generates the substantive resources of authenticity and legitimacy required by the leadership, as well as an ethic of solidarity between the leadership and 38 Degrees members. The medium again becomes the message, in a process reminiscent of what Erik Bucy and Kimberly Gregson (2001) have elsewhere termed “media participation.” But still, this ability to react in real time is shaped in advance by planning and preparation. Seemingly loose, flexible, and “spontaneous” mobilization, which takes place in some cases within just a couple of hours, depends upon a blend of viral messaging across its online supporter networks, ongoing organizational capacity through online polling, a keen awareness of the policy and news cycles, and a degree of interconnectedness with the news values and temporal rhythms of older media.

  These are 38 Degrees’ contributions to the hybrid media system. They have enabled the movement to recruit a million members in little more than two years and, on occasion, to influence policy. In 2011 38 Degrees mobilized 530,000 people to sign an online petition, 100,000 people to e-mail their MPs, and 220,000 people to share a campaign on Facebook to stop the British government from introducing plans to privatize more than quarter of a million hectares of the nation’s public forests. In a move that was based on the understanding that certain information signals are more likely to be taken seriously than others by professional journalists and political elites, it also raised funds to commission the professional polling company YouGov to ask a representative sample of the British public about their views on the government’s forest proposals. The results revealed that 84 percent were opposed to the plans. To reinforce the poll’s findings, the 38 Degrees members then raised £60,000 from members to pay for a series of full-page ads publicizing the poll’s findings in national newspapers. Babbs and Lownsbrough also made several television and radio appearances. Within a few weeks, the government’s plans were withdrawn.

  As this analysis reveals, 38 Degrees employs a careful division of labor in its approach to media. Online media are perceived as better for tight feedback loops, coordination, more active engagement, and representing the movement to itself. But being able to publicize its action through broadcast and print media helps target policy elites, validate the movement, and create highly visible signs of its efficacy for wider publics. This norm of a division of labor in media logics also underpins emerging practice in the fields of election campaigning and government, to which I now turn.

  Blurring the Boundaries Between “New Media,” “Press,” and “Communications”

  In the run-up to the 2010 British general election there was a frenzy of commentary about the role the internet might play in the campaign. This was fueled by the view that the medium had decisively shaped the 2008 American presidential campaign. As I showed in chapters 6 and 7, such an interpretation is only partly correct: the internet’s role in 2008 is better understood if it is set in the context of its interactions with older media, particularly television. With this in mind, I was eager to explore insider views of election campaigning and government communications in the British context. I wanted to learn about how those working inside parties and government were making sense of claims about the growing role of online media in their fields of practice. My analysis in this section draws upon interviews I conducted with senior officials who were working (or who had recently worked) inside Labour and Conservative party headquarters, senior officials working at the Cabinet Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), former senior officials in the Prime Minister’s Office, a director of the London office of an international public relations agency dealing with political campaigns, and a former press officer for the trade union movement. Across these fields, I identified an overarching process of transition from organizational norms that depend upon quite clear divisions between the roles of “new media” and “press,” toward a newer, more integrated set of norms based upon what those working in these fields often simply label “communications.” However, this is a process riddled with tensions and contradictions. There are significant differences of emphasis in how things are evolving across different organizational fields, and it is clear that much is up for grabs. Still, “communications” is now increasingly deployed to provide an overarching identity for a diverse range of roles and to enact an integrated approach to persuasive strategic communication in the fields of election campaigning and government communications.

  Craig Elder worked as a senior member of the Conservative Party’s communications
team from 2006 to 2011. I interviewed Elder soon after the 2010 general election. He sums up the Conservatives’ campaign as being about the integration of “new media” personnel with the senior decision-making team. A previous distinction between “IT” and “communications” is now disappearing, he argues, as communications is becoming a realm that encompasses strategic decisions about online campaigning but no longer includes the daily grunt work that is now carried out by IT staff. As he puts it: