Newsroom With A View

I remember clearly the moment when I realized that, for all the hype about how he really “got” young people and new media, Barack Obama’s campaign really was, at heart, very old-school. It was about 4 a.m., when his campaign sent out the long-promised text message “announcement” of his vice presidential pick, which had leaked to traditional media sources hours earlier. I had signed up to get the text, and every now and again, as unpredictably as solar flares, I still get Obama texts (years passed without me getting any at all). And last night, the current Republican nominee running against Obama, Mitt Romney, proved that his campaign also still does not quite get the new media environment because, as the Washington Post reported, a generic RomneyRyan.com site began redirecting to the Romney campaign site before anyone had made the announcement, and the pick was confirmed before anyone got word through what the campaign had hyped as the “first” place people would find out. The Web is still “the other,” like posters on a wall, not a constantly-on information source.

UPDATE: The first official leak apparently was the old-fashioned kind, human, reported at 12:01 a.m.