For the sixth Paul J. Schatt Memorial Lecture, Washington Post national political editor Steven Ginsberg demonstrated the digital future of the Post, analyzed the momentum of the Republican primary and made bold predictions about the upcoming presidential election.
Ginsberg’s talk ran for nearly an hour and a half, and he spent much of that time fielding questions from the audience of more 100 people. The discussion was moderated by Leonard Downie Jr., the Weil Family Professor of Journalism at the Cronkite School and vice president at large of the Post.
The new Washington Post iPad app was prominently featured in the discussion, especially its use in covering the Republican presidential primary and other elections.
“What we tried to do with the iPad app is boil it down to the things you really need to know,” Ginsberg said.
Ginsberg demonstrated components of the iPad app, including diagrams illustrating candidate’s platforms, maps of both historical and up-to-date political polling, and the Pinocchio Tracker, a fact-checking service that ranks the severity of political lies.
“If you get one Pinocchio, you told a little lie,” Ginsberg said. “If you get four Pinocchios, you really told a whopper.”
Ginsberg discussed the importance of digital platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, sites that he argued had eclipsed the role blogging played in previous elections. According to Ginsberg, “the biggest change from the last election to this one is Twitter.”
Downie agreed that new technologies have often enabled journalists to do better work than what was possible in the past.
“Speaking for the old days, it wasn’t always better, and in fact it often wasn’t as good as it is now,” he said. He cited the example that most newspapers covering the 1980 presidential election were unable to accurately predict Reagan’s landslide victory. According to Downie, modern election reporting is typically more comprehensive than it used to be.
Still, Ginsberg said digital technology has yet to catch up with physical copies of the Post in terms of profit: “The newspaper is still king in terms of revenue.”
In the 2012 election so far, Ginsberg highlighted the importance of seeking out the opinions of the broader electorate rather than a politically engaged minority, but said that this has become more difficult in recent years for his publication and others.
“The Washington Post used to have, I don’t know, half a dozen, eight, 10 national bureaus and we had people all over the country talking to people all of the time. We don’t have any national bureaus now, so when we go out into the country, we go out in a targeted way,” Ginsberg said.
Looking to the general election, Ginsberg predicted Mitt Romney would most likely be chosen as the Republican candidate. He also staked the claim that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is a more probable choice than Santorum to become Romney’s vice-presidential candidate.
“I think Romney’s going to win because he’s winning,” Ginsberg said. “He’s so far ahead of Santorum and the other candidates that it’s unlikely they’ll catch up.”
However, Ginsberg suggested the possibility that Santorum and Gingrich will be able to prevent Romney from reaching the required number of delegates to become his party’s official nominee, but called the scenario “unlikely,” “hard to imagine” and “ugly.”
“The conventional wisdom is always that, no matter how nasty the primary, if you’re the party out of power you want to win,” Ginsberg said. “I don’t think you can dismiss what’s happening within the party. … That’s a story we wrestle with, actually. Our reporters feel like they’ll all get behind whoever it is to beat President Obama. I’m not so sure. So, we have to figure out where people are, what they’re thinking, and what their motivation is.”
Partially due to the division within the Republican Party, Ginsberg predicted that Obama will ultimately be re-elected in the general election.
“I said a year ago Obama would be up by five to seven points and he’d win by one or two. I’ll stick with that. It seems like if the election were held today he would win. The question is what are the next six months like.”
Michael Brewer, a 26-year-old student at the Cronkite School, was enthusiastic about the lecture.
“I was really impressed with the iPad app,” Brewer said. “I honestly hadn’t even heard about it before, but it was amazing.”
Contact the reporter at bkutzler@asu.edu
