Jose Antonio Vargas: Courtesy of The WashingtonianJose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, spoke today to a class of budding journalists about his job covering the intersection of technology and politics for the Washington Post, and how technology is changing the face of politics and journalism today.
He says he got interested in covering the 2008 presidential campaign when Hillary Clinton
announced her candidacy on YouTube. In that video, she said she wanted to have a conversation with the people she would be counting on to elect her, but Vargas said it seemed overly staged and not genuine in the YouTube environment.
“I wrote a one page memo to [several editors] and said, 'You know, somebody should probably cover what this means—the tension of the chaos and unorganized nature of the YouTube era versus the controlled, choreographed, top-down nature of politics.”
This led to several articles he wrote about the changing face of political campaigns in an online world.
One of these articles focused on the Obama campaign's online presence, and how it was different from that of his competitors.
"In politics right now, we're entering a stage in which you can't just run a campaign, you have to run a movement. You have to be about a cause. … The technology should allow you to do this,” Vargas said. “The beauty of the Obama campaign is ... their campaign was really about letting people in.”
Candidates like Clinton, Mitt Romney, and John McCain missed this point, and therefore had less success with their online presence, he said. They tried to use technologies like YouTube, Facebook, and text messaging, but missed a fundamental part of the equation.
"It's not about the technology, it's about what people do with it, how people use it," said Vargas.
Translating Technology
Vargas connected the new online environment in politics to the new online environment in news, and how journalists should be thinking about technology differently. He relayed a story of how he used Facebook to contact an eyewitness of the Virginia Tech shooting, much like he said the Virgina Tech community gathered online after the tragedy.
"When I look at the Internet, I look at it as a form of community and connection. And I think if you keep that in mind, I think that opens up whole new sets of story ideas, because online, nobody's invisible. Everybody's visible. You've just gotta go look for them.”
Vargas also believes the technology people use everyday is now changing the relationship between journalist and audience, and in fact, he says that relationship is breaking down.
"We are not in charge anymore. News organizations aren't in charge. Our job now is to make sure that we're listening to the readers as much as we can,” said Vargas. "News to me right now is about 3 things: connection, community, conversation."
He says that recognizing the limitations of reporters and news organizations to only produce a little slice of information that is now available in an online world is the key to changing the current fortunes of the journalism industry.
"I almost want to take a leave from writing and go on a tour across the country and talk to news executives and sit them down and explain to them what is actually happening," said Vargas.
Cross-posted to the American Observer.
