Deconstructing Politico 44: Diary, yes. Living? Think again.

Clay Shirky says: “Here’s Comes Everybody!” To which Scott Berkun seems to answer: “OK, but who do you call in from the street, who gets through the door, and how do you make the guests stay?”

In other words, multimedia is an open but managed experience.

I sympathize. Deconstructing Politico 44 by using the concepts outlined in Berkun’s Chapter Three has shown me how to figure out what to do when faced with a multimedia project. What is Politico 44’s vision? It says so in the banner: to provide “a living diary of the Obama Presidency.” What were the requirements: why was this site done? who wants it? for what purpose?

Meeting the requirements requires planning from three angles. First and most important is the customer perspective. Did readers ask for or complain about some things, or did Politico’s creators think readers would want and should have this site? Second is the technology perspective, which in the case of Politico 44 adopted the “aesthetic” of the main Politico website (and was evidently covered by its budget).

Third is the business perspective, where I started to have some issues with how Politico went about designing this site. I assume that Politico’s marketing team conducted surveys, focus groups or direct market research to find out what will motivate readers to use Politico 44 if it were provided, and whether there already are competitors (Table 3.2 of Berkun’s book).

Guess what? There is a very powerful competitor, and it’s no less than the White House website itself, where I searched for “President’s Schedule” and found Streaming Today, which covers the daily schedule at the White House. The White House site provides live streaming and video archives, while Politico 44’s link on “Obama in Video” provides video archives only. Interactivity in Politico 44 and the home website is also low, since the Multimedia link mainly features posted videos and slideshows. The White House site allows users to get regular updates by email, and Politico 44 provides for email alerts, but the White House site gives the impression of greater promise and ability to deliver.

Is one better than the other? Politico 44 has a useful Whiteboard and a Speedread that updates headlines about every 2 hours. But how different is that from regular updates in mainstream news websites, or even the front pages of Yahoo and AOL? Not much. The schedule on the right side also did not change much during the hours that I observed the site, over a few days. Normally, it shouldn’t, since official schedules are locked in advance. Thus, “Minute by Minute” as bannered in the Home Page created unmet expectations.

I was curious over lunch today whether this carried through to Politico's hard copy. In the June 10, 2009 issue, Politico 44 is bannered on page 3, but it had a seamless look with the rest of the Politico paper. And the long articles it contained (like Obama's approval of the pay-as-you-go plan) certainly did not have the urgent feel to it of minute-to-minute news, since I read about it in the Washington Post and New York Times at breakfast.

I do like Politico 44 but while deconstructing it, I sense that if its Venn diagram were drawn (Figure 3.2 of Berkun’s book), there would be a generous overlap between business and technology considerations, but at the possible expense of meeting customer needs. If I could actually deconstruct the process that created Politico 44, I would be most interested in studying the feature statements from potential users, which according to Berkun could be the most difficult part of planning a multimedia project. The "minute by minute"-ness of the site needs a burning issue, a hook, but that is not clear from the random content, and the "Obama Presidency" concept is too vast to be one.

Misunderstanding the customer need not be a fatal flaw, but it could certainly weaken you against the competition. And with the Obama machinery’s proven effectiveness in digital campaigns, the competition is formidable.