Debatable

A bipartisan working group led by heavy-hitters from recent Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns, chaired by the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Kathleen Hall Jamieson, has issued a major 47-page report chock-a-block with recommendations for increasing “the value and viewership of presidential general election debates,” arguing they need to be updated to take into account the rise of early voting, the ubiquity of social media, the spread of alternative media networks, changes in campaign financing, and the increase in independent voters. Here’s my quick take.

In other news, National Journal’s Shane Goldmacher offers an excellent soup-to-nuts catalog of the many ways presidential campaigns are trying to take advantage of Facebook’s unrivaled advertising and targeting opportunities. He writes: ”
Thanks to powerful new features unveiled since the 2012 campaign, Facebook now offers a far more customized and sophisticated splicing of the American electorate. And, for the first time in presidential politics, it can serve up video to those thinly targeted sets of people. That unprecedented combination is inching campaigns closer to the Holy Grail of political advertising: the emotional impact of television delivered at an almost atomized, individual level. It makes the old talk of micro-targeting soccer moms and NASCAR dads sound quaint.”

Derek Willis of the New York Times’ Upshot section notes that Jeb Bush, who just formally announced his candidacy, has being doing little to build a robust online presence.

Digital strategist Mike Connery took a close look at the websites of 25 top think tanks, and what he found probably won’t surprise you: The vast majority aren’t making full use of social media sharing or embedding of their data. And yes, think tanks still love to post their content in .pdf files. “We have yet to see the emergence of a true, digitally native think tank,” he writes, offering a range of innovative ideas worth studying. He also shares this tidbit from the World Bank:

In an analysis of their own PDF reports conducted last year, the World Bank found that 1/3 of all reports published in PDF format by the bank had never been downloaded. Fewer than 13 percent had been downloaded more than 250 times, making PDF files—the dominant format think tanks use to present information—almost wholly ineffective in helping think tanks achieve their goals.

Sam Gustin of Vice’s Motherboard takes a close look at the potential rise of the “internet voter,” building on conversations he tracked while attending Personal Democracy Forum earlier this month.

Michael Cornfield of George Washington University took seven of his grad students to PDF, and in this post he explains why belonging to the “civic community” is essential to innovating successfully.

Saving face? Nine major civil liberties and consumer advocate groups have withdrawn from ongoing talks with trade associations over facial recognition technology regulations because they couldn’t achieve a minimum goal of insuring that companies would first seek and obtain permission from people before employing such techniques to identify them in public, Natasha Singer reports for the New York Times.

Meanwhile, as privacy scholar Kate Crawford helpfully points out on Twitter, “companies sell facial recognition software for churches to track people attending services.”

Thirteen years after legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security included a provision creating the National Emergency Technology Guard, FEMA is finally signing agreements with major tech companies setting up the service, Jeff Mapes reports for The Oregonian. The service, which was inspired by our own Andrew Rasiej, who helped organize industry volunteers after 9/11 to help rebuild digital services near Ground Zero, was championed in Congress for more than a decade by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).

The city of Syracuse, NY, is asking its residents to fill out surveys about their internet service to help the city decide whether it should build its own high-speed network, Tim Knauss reports for Syracuse.com.