First Read: "Weeklies Vie For Candidates' Attention"

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WEEKLIES VIE FOR CANDIDATES' ATTENTION

Posted: Tuesday, November 27, 2007 7:01 PM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under: 2008, Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Obama, Iowa, New Hampshire


From Aswini Anburajan and Carrie Dann
On the Sunday evening following Thanksgiving, John Beaudoin received the phone call he had been waiting ten long months for. Beaudin who publishes two weekly newspapers in Iowa, the Logan Herald-Observer (circulation 1,427) and the smaller Woodbine Twiner (circulation 1,143) had been e-mailing and calling the Clinton campaign since January to request an interview with the senator.

He finally heard back this past weekend, the day after a well publicized appearance by Obama in the region and a prominent story in the New York Times commending the Obama campaign's outreach to local weekly and daily newspapers, as also noted at The Rural Blog, of the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

Referring to the phone call he received from the Clinton campaign as a "breakthrough," Beaudoin said that he found its timing to be "rather odd."
"The timing seems to be working in their favor,” Beaudoin said. “The New York Times piece gave Obama good press about how his people are handling weekly papers. She dropped in the polls recently… We've offered her front-page space for the past 10 months -- just like all the other candidates. It's always time constraints and one person gets the message and the other person doesn't get the message.”

In contrast, Beaudoin praised Obama's efforts to reach out to his paper, which included an attentive advance and communications staff who reached out to him before and during a tightly packed event at a cattle auction in Dunlap, Iowa. He added that he was sought out by the campaign along with another local reporter and given private time with the candidate.

The experience prompted him to write an editorial on the process, which will run in Wednesday's edition of his paper:
"The fact that Obama and his campaign are putting this much effort into courting a small newspaper is impressive in itself,” he writes. “When you couple that with the polls that now show him in the lead in Iowa and you can tell that strategy is proven to work. Small town newspapers have loyal, thoughtful and intelligent readers who, most importantly, vote during elections. Whether you agree with Obama's politics or not is really a side issue -- he's taking the time to do things that other candidates simply do not. The bad press and drop in poll numbers should have caught someone's attention in the Clinton camp.
“And if it gets me an interview with her, even better.”

Beaudoin's experience is a typical example of the intricate courtship between campaigns and local media, where campaigns can either play the role of earnest suitor or coquettish maiden whose hand always appears to be just out of grasp. Though the readership of the local weeklies and dailies are small, the combined circulation of these papers can often shame the larger dailies in the state, and they often provide a bully pulpit for candidates looking to connect with the local population in a more grassroots fashion. And, as described by the case above, how candidates handle the local press has the potential to backfire.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/11/27/483605.aspx

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