Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report

“With the Republican presidential campaign poised to open, conservative activists signaled on Saturday that they were remarkably unsettled over who should win the party’s nomination, creating a wide-open race over the next year for the right to challenge President Obama,” the New York Times is reporting.

“Representative Ron Paul of Texas won the straw poll for the second year in a row, while Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, took second place. The results reflected the challenges that lie ahead for Republicans as they try to unite the party behind the goal of defeating Mr. Obama.”

“Mr. Paul received 30 percent of the vote, while Mr. Romney recorded 23 percent. The rest of the potential contenders finished in single digits, including Sarah Palin, who declined an invitation to speak here and received support from only 3 percent of attendees.”

The rest of the article is here.

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“In an expansion of their political footprint, the billionaire Koch brothers plan to contribute and steer a total of $88 million to conservative causes during the 2012 election cycle, according to sources, funding a new voter micro-targeting initiative, grass-roots organizing efforts and television advertising campaigns,” Politico is reporting.

“The aggressive embrace of political activism by the Koch brothers, Charles and David, has cheered fiscal conservatives, who hope they will reorient the conservative political apparatus around free-market, small government principles and candidates, and away from the electability-over-principles approach they see Rove and Gillespie as embodying.

“But not everyone on the right is happy about the brothers’ increasing political profile. Some conservatives complain that the political operatives who work for the Kochs don’t play well with others in the movement and worry that their efforts to steer big money to favored groups undermines other, potentially valuable conservative efforts.”

Charles and David Koch reportedly have a net worth of $21.5 billion each, thanks to their stakes in Koch Industries, their privately owned oil, chemical and consumer products company.

The rest of the article is here.

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Kansas State’s Wheat State Agronomy Club loves WTF! This poster hangs in the main hallway and fills the bulletin board. Talk about an attention grabber.

(Credit: Dana Duncan Minihan)

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It’s hard for many old-timers to accept, but social media is subsuming print media (not the other way around), including in our neck of the woods.

The latest global example: BBC news journalists have been told to use social media as a primary source of information by the new director of BBC Global News who took over last week.

“This isn’t just a kind of fad from someone who’s an enthusiast of technology. I’m afraid you’re not doing your job if you can’t do those things. It’s not discretionary”, the new executive, Peter Horrocks, said in The Guardian. The article is here.

For CNN integrating social media has improved their reporting and got them closer to their sources, as seen with the coverage of the Haiti earthquake, according to The Guardian. The uprising in Egypt this week, which included first-hand accounts on social media, is another example. 

Aggregating social media content with attribution should become part of a BBC journalist’s assignment, Horrocks said.

This blog regularly goes to social media for attributed reporting in the foothills — finding out about a petition opposed to the Hospitality House on SAMBA soccer’s Facebook page, for example, or getting the first report that Nevada City bought Sugarloaf Mountain from Reinette Senum’s Facebook page. The details are here and here.

To be sure, you need to check out your facts: Some of the social-media or blog content is trivial and inaccurate — just as it can be in the mainstream media or a “source” on the street, I might add.

But in many cases, you can find “diamonds in the rough.” The examples I’m citing (Hospitality House and SugarLoaf, for example) are cases of straight-forward reporting of information, not opinions, that you can find on Facebook, Twitter or blogs. 

Other examples include the “scoops” on this blog, which appear in the local newspaper only after they are handed a press release a week later. The mainstream media is having a hard time accepting they are not the only news “source.”

Not just readers but investors are noticing this trend. “Facebook, which is filled with a growing abundance of user-generated content, is considered by its investors to be 83 times more valuable than McClatchy, which employs hundreds, if not thousands, of journalists,” as the media blog Newsosaur observed this week. 

(Chart: Newsosaur)

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