Offline with Jon Favreau - How Can Democrats Win the Digital Wars?

Episode Date: August 14, 2022

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

Like, normally, I would say that Twitter fights or people that are very online with politics, it's like a little too insular to matter. But this clearly seems to be working for the Fetterman campaign, his online presence. Why do you think it's working? It's brilliant. I think it's brilliant. I think it's absolutely brilliant. There's a few tenets to it that I think are just incredibly smart. One, repetition.

People need to hear things a dozen times before it sinks in. And a lot of people are too scared of that, right? They're like, oh, I'm going to turn people off because I'm saying the same thing over and over again. The key is to make it fresh every time, but the same message gets across. Dr. Oz will never, ever, ever be able to change anyone's mind in Pennsylvania or in elite political national circles that he's not from New Jersey. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest today is political strategist and journalist Tara McGowan. I've wanted to have a conversation about democratic digital strategy for a while now.

I had a great conversation a few episodes ago with Jennifer Senior about how Steve Bannon weaponized the Internet for Trump and the MAGA movement. So I thought it'd be good to dive into ways that Democrats are fighting back. What made me finally do this was a recent piece in The New York Times titled Fed Up with Democratic Emails? You're not The Only One. It was written by Lara Putnam and Micah Siffrey and argues that Democrats need to rethink our digital strategy, which, yeah, have you seen those fundraising emails and texts? They are unbelievably annoying. And the piece argues that they're not just ineffective, but actively hurting our cause. I wanted to dig into that and more. The good, the bad, and the ugly of the

Democratic Party's digital strategy. And I figured Tara would be a great guide for this conversation because she's one of the party's smartest digital strategists. In 2016, she ran digital for the Democratic Super PAC Priorities USA. In 2020, she started Acronym, which made a lot of the most creative and effective digital ads of the cycle. Today, Tara is completely rethinking what digital strategy means, serving as the publisher of Good Information Inc., a collection of local news organizations built for the digital age. I asked Tara about how our digital war has changed since 2016, what impact, if any, political advertising has in the social media age,

and who in politics is effectively winning the digital war. We talked John Fetterman tweets, dark Brandon memes, and so much more. Our conversation gave me hope that even if Nancy Pelosi won't stop spamming me for money, Democrats may still be able to win the digital war. As always, if you have comments, questions, or complaints, please email us at offline at cricket.com. And please rate, review, and share the show. Here's Tara McGowan. please email us at offline at cricket.com and please rate review and share the show here's tara mcgowan tara mcgowan welcome to offline thanks so much for having me john it's so good to be here

i know i haven't talked to you in a while i know i'm a big podcast i'm a big fan of offline i've been on wilderness but never this one. You're about to hit all the trifecta of podcasts that I host. And the irony is not lost on me that you're having me join a podcast called Offline. I know. I know. Believe me. Can't wait for your questions. So we've done episodes on right-wing extremism and disinformation and propaganda. I talked to Jennifer Senior about how Steve Bannon weaponized the internet to build the MAGA movement and elect Donald Trump. I wanted to do an episode about what Democrats are up to online since we're not always known for our digital savvy. And I thought, who better to have this conversation with than one of the party's best digital strategists and most honest critics.

But I'd love to start with one of your earlier gigs when you ran the digital operation of a big Democratic super PAC called Priorities USA in the 2016 election. In terms of digital strategy, what did you learn from that race about what Democrats were getting wrong and what Trump had done right and the Trump campaign had done right? So in 2016, something that I did pick up on in my role running Priorities Digital was that the platforms were changing quickly. And when I say platforms, I'm talking specifically about Facebook and Instagram, right? They are constantly evolving. And at that point in time, they had evolved very quickly away from kind of how they operated and how campaigns could utilize them and work with them in previous cycles. That was happening in real time. They were offering

more services. They were offering kind of more capabilities for ad targeting and leveraging their platform to reach new audiences and keep them engaged. And yet on the Democratic side, the best digital strategists on the left had really professionalized digital strategy and either had started their own or joined agencies that became the buffers and the middlemen between campaigns and candidates and these platforms, right? There is a story that everybody knows about this related to how, which the story was, they got it wrong, the media in a lot of ways. But what they boiled it down to was that Hillary Clinton campaign denied support from Facebook to use Facebook more smartly, and the Trump campaign embedded someone into their campaign from Facebook. So that is one instance where I just think that the professionalization of digital strategy and

tactics on the left actually prevented campaigns and organizations from being more nimble, more creative, more innovative, and more effective at using these platforms and tools in the ways that they could be leveraged. And that came from just sort of continuing on the playbook of, we will use email and social to raise money for campaigns, and it will pay for itself, and that will justify our large digital teams. And then we will use the platforms to drive one-way advertising for those campaigns. And it wasn't until later cycles after 2016 that we really started to see campaigns and the party embrace digital organizing, bringing organizing into digital and into social media spaces and into their teams and their budgets, as well as starting

to kind of think beyond just one-way transactional communications. Well, so talk more about digital organizing and sort of the lessons that you took from 2016 and applied to 2020 when you started a political organization called ACRONYM. You led a $100 million digital campaign to beat Trump. Obviously, that was part of a broader effort that worked. Can you talk a bit about that campaign? What worked? What was different than past Democratic campaigns? What were the lessons learned and how were they applied?

Yeah, absolutely. The entire reason I started Acronym was that there was not a space on the left that was fully committed to driving experimentation and innovation and impact to advance progressive causes and candidates online. We had the digital agencies that I mentioned as sort of middlemen and brokers of the relationships with the platforms. And then we had in-house kind of teams that would dissipate after elections. And so one of the things that we really, really prioritized was how can we run the most effective digital advertising and media campaigns that leverage the best in terms of data science and targeting that focused on audiences that were not being reached or valued by most campaigns or other organizations, which is a core part of our model then and my model now at my new organization. And also, how could we just throw a bunch of different things at the wall? Because you never actually know what's going to work in such a rapidly evolving and disruptive

media ecosystem and be able to sort of scale what works. And so it was really important to us that we identified what messages and messengers and content types were going to move the people who were not already on our side against Trump, right? How were we going to inform and educate them? And so that meant really doing an enormous amount of testing and learning and focusing on what things worked with audiences that were not already opposed to Trump, but also weren't already so in the bag for him that we couldn't pull them out of that rabbit hole. And so that's what ultimately drove our program. It led us to focus on what we describe as the millions of low turnout, less politically engaged Americans who don't vote in most elections at all. If they vote at all,

it's in presidentials and focused on how do we inform them with really good factual information they are not getting otherwise, where they are in ways that they will consume, which is common sense, but actually quite novel in a political landscape that still spends billions of dollars on one-way advertising on television, radio, mail, and increasingly the internet. Yeah, well, let's talk about this a little more, because we've talked on this show before about how, you know, and again on The Wilderness, about how, you know, there's a small percentage of people, of the electorate, not just of the American people, of the electorate, that consumes a lot of politics, that follows politics closely. And then there's the vast majority of voters, people who show up

at the ballot box to vote, who just do not pay that much attention to the news and do not follow politics that closely. How do you reach that group of people with, I guess what you're talking about is digital advertising. Where are they seeing this? How do they consume this? How do they engage with this if they're not paying that much attention to the news anyway? Yeah. So, I mean, it starts with just the basic premise is that you have to go where people are. So traditional media and the ecosystem that, you know, no longer exists, but existed for a lot of folks that are still working in politics at senior levels, that was very one way. It was very centralized. There were a few channels that you could guarantee reach of the broadest, largest audience possible with your message,

if you purchased airtime, or if you got your story placed or you your interview placed through through local or national media. And, And this is about like, this is about television advertising or newspapers or, you know, people thinking that like, I'll have a buy on cable or a local news channel or a radio ad. And this is not really reaching how most people consume media. That's right. Earned media and paid media, right? And so there wasn't owned media, which I'm sure we'll talk about, which is the third sort of leg of that stool. And so, I mean, essentially now in a decentralized media and information ecosystem, i.e. the internet, where you get to choose what information you want, what websites you go to, what apps you download, what social media platforms you have accounts on

that you spend your time on, they are aggregators. The meta platforms and TikTok are aggregators of content and content creators. It's a one-stop shop. The algorithm learns you, it feeds you the things that you want or things that it thinks that you'll like based on your behavior. And so you don't really have to do very much. You're super passive. It all comes to you. And so people who want to deliver their message or their theory of the case to an audience need to go to them. And going to them means a far more diverse, creative communication strategy than they've ever had to do before. It's disarming and it's overwhelming, I think, to traditional communication strategists

and political strategists that you can no longer bank on a few spaces to get your message to be able to reach and engage people. And not only that, there's a higher bar for how that message is delivered. Which I think is a really positive thing that the internet and social media has done. You can't bullshit people anymore. You really, I mean, well, there's a massive caveat there

because the right has bullshitted a lot of people really effectively. But my point is authenticity is really, really, really, really key. And political advertisements generally do not actually evoke authenticity or personality or kind of human connection. And those are the things that people are looking for on the platforms they're on. And so it really meant needing to rethink. And again, I'm kind of like starting at, you know, 2016 to 2020 now, not necessarily where we are today because it's shifting so quickly. But it really meant that you, one, had to go to the places where people were spending their time, like Facebook and Instagram, and now increasingly TikTok. And then you had to figure out how to communicate your message in a really, really authentic and compelling and creative way that was going to

grab people's attention who do not pay attention to politics. And often that means not leading with politics. Well, can you give an example of a piece of content that you guys produced at Acronym in 2020 that is not the typical political advertisement that can seem bullshitty to people? Sure. We did a ton of them. So I'll give a small array. So one looked like a really, really, and was a very polished advertisement. So traditional, strong marketing advertisement, but it connected with an enormous amount of people because it was incredibly funny and edgy and surprising, which a lot of young people in particular don't expect out of political content or ads. And this was our don't vote video, which was a string of old people asking young people not to vote so they could keep the world the way that they would like it to be. And so that was more of a traditional ad format, but it still had an edge to it that was uncommon at the time in a lot of political ads.

I mean, we invested a ton in memes. And I think one of our most effective, it was on TikTok and Snapchat and Instagram at the very end when stories were becoming more popular in 2020, where it was one of our video editors who got on camera, who was awesome and like very authentic and just like talking to people about why they should vote and making jokes. And like, she was like laying in bed for one of them, which now is like every video you watch on TikTok.

Right, yeah. We're doing that, but it was actually novel and different then. And it was about registering and getting out to vote and it drove enormous engagement and reach. And so we just have always, I think the teams that I've had over the years, we've always focused on how do we push the envelope or how do we get on or ahead of the curve rather than be the best one that's doing the old format, since those are not actually reaching the folks that really, they need an

extra push. It's not just about the information. It's actually about getting them to pay attention to begin with before they consume the information. You've said that by the end of the 2020 campaign, Democrats had closed the digital gap with Republicans, maybe even had the advantage in terms of innovation and infrastructure. Since then, what do you think has been the party's biggest challenge in terms of communicating with voters? Well, so I think fully left electoral politics in many ways over the past year to focus on building a news organization, which is what I think is the present, current day and future communications. I think you know something about that too. But from what I've observed, I don't think there has been that much self-reflection or innovation, to be honest. I think we're still seeing a lot of the same tactics be used and abused in terms of communicating with the base, which is really, really depressing and very dangerous. largest turnout surge in the country for Democrats into continuing to treat them like pawns as

opposed to the people that delivered the progress we are now enjoying. Well, I was going to say, like, one of the reasons I finally got around to doing this episode was that New York Times piece by Lara Putnam and Micah Sifri titled Fed Up with Democratic Emails, You're Not the Only One. And for people who haven't read it, basically, they cite studies that show all those alarmist fundraising emails and texts that, you know, Nancy Pelosi sending you. The weirdest fucking thing is they give you the text that's a fundraising pitch. And it's like a picture of them, the politician, but it's like a picture of the it's like their headshot from somewhere. So it's like, picture of them, the politician. But it's like a picture of – it's like their headshot from somewhere.

So it's like that's – oh, Bernie Sanders is sending me his headshot and also asking me for some money? And like what is going on there? And then the studies basically show that not only are those ineffective, they're actually hurting the cause. I assume you agree with that. That's right. I do. I do agree with that. And I also think it's just another symptom of laziness and misaligned incentives by agencies that innovated originally or took an innovative tactic and scaled it and

became profitable because of it and don't have the wherewithal or the bandwidth or the resources as a small agency or large agency to rethink what the long-term damage they might be doing and innovate and come up with other strategies to achieve the goals that they're there to achieve. And so like, I have some sympathy for agencies and consultants. They don't have a lot of R&D budget. That's why I had created an acronym originally. So they keep doing the things that worked in the past and they're short-sighted about it, right? It's short-term impact, it's short-term ROI, short-term dollars raised on things. If it worked in the past, they assume it'll work again. It's resting on their own conventional wisdom. And there isn't

a lot of ability to measure the long-term decay or backlash impact it can have, which I think that article that you mentioned, it articulated really, really well, which is that you can actually demoralize and depress your base audience if you're constantly going back to the well with another crisis, another we need your $4 right now. People can feel used. They feel exhausted or annoyed by it at the best case scenario, and they feel used and abused at the worst case scenario. And that's not building a really healthy, thriving community, which is what you actually need to deliver the progress

that we want. People don't want to be taken for granted. And I think that is how anyone who receives those emails or text messages feel. And you're just annoyed. I do this for a living. I give money all the time to Paul. And I'm just like, stop, stop, delete, block that call. It's just, it's really, but here's the thing. I get agencies, right?

I don't get how campaigns staffed by extremely talented people, many of whom we know, allow that to happen. Because just from a self-preservation perspective, they want to win and they don't want to turn people off. So how do campaigns still allow this to happen? Well, I think that it's – and it's not true for all campaigns, right? We should talk about some of the ones that aren't doing that, that are doing amazing things. Yeah, for sure. I mean, everyone wants to talk about now because it's so great as all campaigns, right? We should talk about some of the ones that aren't doing that, that are doing amazing things. Yeah, for sure. Like the campaign everyone wants to talk about now because it's so great is Fetterman's in Pennsylvania. But I think part of the reason is because it's siloed.

Online fundraising is a core piece of any campaign, right? That campaigns rely on now, thankfully, to bring in enormous sums of money for their candidates. And yet it is not always integrated with the communication strategy or even the win strategy, right? So they're deploying the best practices they've seen in the past that brings in small dollar donations, but it doesn't often reflect the overarching narrative if it's not like well-run campaigns do, but of the overall campaign. And so they're not thinking about the damage it could be doing as long as it's still bringing in the dollars, right? It's very data driven, and it's often very siloed from the rest of the campaign strategy. And that has to change, because it's difficult.

Like if you're still bringing in dollars, they're not looking at the negative results, right? Unlike like the dollar stop. And I think that's- They're saying, look, we raised this much. We did our job. That's what you need. Right, you cannot measure your email campaign success purely on dollars brought in because if you start to lose engagement in other ways, that's going to be really dangerous

because those are the people you need the most. You piss off your donors. How are you going to convince people that are never going to give you a dollar to turn out and vote for you? It's just short-sighted. Well, I was going to bring it up, but you just mentioned mentioned it let's talk about fetterman uh let's talk about people democratic campaigns and candidates that are that are doing things right online

what do you make of his his relentless dunking on dr oz because like normally i would say that twitter fights or or people that are very online with politics It's like a little too insular to matter, but this clearly seems to be working for the Fetterman campaign, his online presence. Why do you think it's working? It's brilliant. I think it's brilliant. I think it's absolutely brilliant.

There's a few tenets to it that I think are just incredibly smart. One, repetition. People need to hear things a dozen times before it sinks in. And a lot of people are too scared of that, right? They're like, oh, I'm going to turn people off because I'm saying the same thing over and over again. The key is to make it fresh every time, but the same message gets across. Dr. Oz will never, ever, ever be able to change anyone's mind in Pennsylvania or in elite political national circles that he's not from New Jersey.

Like they've been so exceptionally consistent and fresh and creative and they're not going to let out and they shouldn't because that is a core tenant of their messaging campaign. He's not from here. How could he represent you? He doesn't even live here. He doesn't even care enough about the state to live here that message never gets old like that is core to their campaign message and core to and i want to give credit because i don't know where i read this the other day so it is not an original thought on my part but it also encapsulates the core message for why vote for fetterman. I am from here.

I am a Pennsylvanian and I am here to represent you. And like, I am not of the, you know, elite class, the political class, and I'm not of New Jersey. And I think that that's just the brilliance of it. And the way that they have creatively the billboards leaving New Jersey, like leaving Pennsylvania for New Jersey, the, I mean, the, the Stevie video from E Street Band, like, it's just so smart and so fresh. And yeah, Twitter will get bored by it, but that does not mean the voters of Pennsylvania won't. Because maybe some of them see one of those or they see a few of those.

But again, that message bakes in. I do think creative repetition is one of the most difficult challenges of messaging in politics because some people know you need the repetition. They know you need to say it over and over and over again. But you say something over and over again, the media gets bored, the voters get bored. So you do have to keep it fresh, but still the same message. And I don't think a lot of people understand that. There's also just the quantity, I think, that comes from the Federman campaign. It made me wonder, like, do you think successful candidates have to be somewhat like Trump in that they are constantly communicating with voters online as their authentic selves?

It feels like we are now in an environment where if you're just going to come out and give us, and I think the Biden folks have had some difficulty with this too, and then the White House makes that trickier as well. But if you're going to be in communication with people, it has to be constant since all of our communication and all of our media is so constant all the time. Yeah. I mean, I think the short answer is yes, you do. It doesn't mean that the candidate always needs to the way that Trump did, right? And I think that's another example of where the Fetterman campaign has been really smart and brilliant. They have stayed making news. They've stayed driving engagement,

even when Fetterman himself has not been that out there or active following his stroke. And so they show that that is possible to do. But yes, we are in a very, very, very fast cycle. You hit the nail on the head on what the tension is and why more campaigns don't do this.

They feel like they need to move with the news cycle or they need to keep the media engaged, et cetera. There's a degree of that, but actually it's to your detriment if you focus on them as your core audience, as we know, I think from historical campaigns right now, focus on delivering your message directly to the people who need it in a consistent, authentic and creative way. And then yes, like you're going to inevitably weigh in on the things that need to be weighed in on related to the national or state news narrative. But I think that's really important. And I also I think that there are basically the flood the zone strategy, to quote Steve

Bannon, is a really effective one. And I think that's another thing that the Fetterman campaign has done in a smart way that is not new. I think the Pete Buttigieg campaign did it in 2020 in the primaries too, which is actually engage your most ardent supporters, your most fierce advocates and fans to be the deployers of your message, to be the ones who are out there sharing it and spreading it. Fetterman has a social squad, social media squad. I don't know if that's the technical term, but it's really, really, really smart because it gives them something they can do. It gives them agency and feels like a real part of the community, which gets at the inverse of what we were talking about before, which is like using and abusing your most valuable supporters. It's like actually

empower them. I think the Obama campaigns did that really well because people want to be a part of something. And so putting them to really, really strategic use, like having them increase the reach of your message, your content, your strategy, while making them feel a real part of something bigger is a win-win. I read a story in The Verge today that the DNC has set up this digital organizing hub where influencers and TikTok creators can get content and messaging to post on their own social feeds, social media feeds. What do you think of that? So I haven't seen what that's going to look like out of the DNC. I think the premise of it is art. So I run a news organization.

I hear it coming out of the DNC and I'm like, we all are. There's a lot of amazing, amazing people there. Totally agree. It is a flawed institution for many. That's another podcast for another time. Yeah, they have a branding issue that isn't necessarily the fault of the people who are working there right now very true and also the perception of what the dnc everybody projects onto the dnc what they think it should be to solve any of the woes of the party like actually it's really about like state data infrastructure like that's like what the dn. And that's, they do that really well. Anyhow, I think,

so I run a news organization, Courier. We are left-leaning, we are transparent about our values, and we are focused on social media driven local news to humanize and localize politics for audiences that are not politically engaged. I bring that up because a really novel thing that we have decided to do at Courier is build a content organizing team. Bringing the best of digital organizing into a newsroom is a really novel concept. And the reason that we're doing it is very similar to what I think this idea by the DNC is, which is to empower people and train them and engage them and deepen engagement with them to be the ones that spread the good information and the content that you are producing. And because it all stems again from that premise of you need to go to people. You do not build it and they come. You need to go to

where people are and you need trusted messengers. And I think this also gets at the rise of and popularity and execution of relational organizing, which my former colleague and dear friend Greta Karnes, she now is a co-founder of a consulting firm that purely works with campaigns to build smart relational organizing programs, which is one to one. Find the friends and network that you have in your community and be the evangelist for that campaign to those people. And that will have a

massive ripple effect. And so I think the more that we can integrate into our media, into organizations, nonprofit organizations, into campaigns, the infrastructure to actually recruit, train, and empower people who support these causes to be the messengers, that is going to be the most effective thing we can do. And it is, again, the inverse of direct one-way paid churn and burn communications. I want to talk about Courier in a bit, because I want to sort of talk about media infrastructure writ large. But just to sort of finish the conversation on what politicians and parties and strategists and campaigns can control, there's obviously a lot of constraints being in

the White House, both legal and financial, that make it harder to sort of execute a good digital strategy. That said, Biden team now has this incredible climate change bill and healthcare bill that they're going to want to sell to voters, especially young voters who primarily get all their news from social media, particularly TikTok. What advice would you give them on on how to sell this bill? Yeah. And the constraints are real. You know them better than I do, but they really are real. They have a lot of limitations and yet they have a lot of opportunity. They can direct a lot of their own communications and media and place it directly on a lot of different platforms and drive that. I think something that I actually feel like I've seen improve greatly in

terms of the White House's communication strategy just over the past, say, month or so, was less a focus on actually like the policies themselves and why aren't we getting credit for all the good that we're doing, a little bit of a chip on a shoulder kind of tone, et cetera, and not really like content that met people where they were or messaging that met people where they are to, and I think it's probably a product of the momentum of like things actually getting done again, that people are feeling good, to a space where they're less focused on that and more focused on moments. And I think that's the advice that I would give is that like we live in an attention economy. It's incredibly hard to break through. And yet if you're the president or you're the White House, you have an advantage. More people are going to pay attention. And so

you can actually take some risks that you have constraints, but you can take some risks. And it's going to drive a lot of reach and engagement. And I think that if they stop talking about the bills themselves, and they think about storytelling, and they think about storytellers who can actually break these things down, And this is a lot of the work that we do in our news organization is how do you make this stuff relevant to people who don't care or who, you know, the New York Times version of what's in this bill doesn't relate to them. And it's a lot of jargon and it's a lot of like palace intrigue and all of this stuff where it's like, actually, what is this going to do for me? That's what Americans care about. And so if we can answer that question and we can answer that question through people

that are interesting, compelling and creative, like that's going to be the most effective strategy and do it all the time everywhere through a bunch of different messengers and channels and have them really explain what does it do for you and in all of the ways because it's going to do so many incredible things and stay away from the numbers, stay away from the price tags and the pay. Like, yes, people should know that this is being paid for by taxing rich people. Like that is what they know that they're going to be stoked about that. That's what they need to know. But like, don't get into the numbers. Don't get into the jargon. Don't get into the policies. Um, talk about what

it's going to do to people and how historic it is and how this is like a step towards more momentum. And I think that's where we finally have so much that the administration and Senate Democrats and House Democrats have done that it's like, let's stop worrying about if the media got it right, because the media is not reaching the vast majority of Americans. And let's start telling the story of what this means now and what this means for the future of the country and the party. So I want to get to the second area where you have a lot of experience. You spent some time as a digital strategist.

Now you're in digital media. You're currently the founder of Good Information, which operates Courier Newsroom, a network of local news operations in eight states. Can you talk about this project and why you started it? And it's funny, I'm remembering something that you said in an interview once where you said you have a a theory that political advertising is dead which is a popular one but like it's funny because that theory that political advertising is dead is is partly what led me to to crooked media too So talk a little bit about that and that, how that kind of led you to, to, to good information. Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I do believe, um, while the industry of political advertising is certainly not dead and still, uh, making and moving a lot of money and advertisements, um, I do believe that the impact of it is close to dead. Um, I think it is, it's,

it's gasping for its last breaths. And why do you think that? In both sides, I think political advertising has contributed to the increased polarization in this country and mistrust in government and politicians, which is deeply dangerous and paves the way for fascism. And most of that is because the vast majority of political ads are negative. They are inauthentic and they tend to validate for people their instinctual fears and concerns and feelings about politics, that it is not for them. It is not representing them. It is corrupt. It is the elite running things. And so it doesn't really do any politicians or candidates any favors when you, again, look at the long-term impact of it. Also,

we tested this. We measured it at Acronym, and we found that boosting news articles and news stories from existing publishers was more effective at informing and mobilizing people who are not politically engaged, people who do not listen to your wonderful podcast, people who are not politically engaged, people who do not listen to your wonderful podcast, people who do not watch cable news or read national newspapers, who, again, I describe as most Americans. And they're the ones who make the difference in elections when they turn out or when they don't. They are the deciders in large part. And they're not really treated with that respect, unfortunately, by the political industry, I think.

And so when we identified this, it was really exciting because it was like, wow, this is something that by delivering news to people and good information that they're not looking for on their own, just making sure it gets into their news feeds, they were getting informed with the facts and they weren't having a negative feeling about either party on account of it, which you do have. Like when you're reached with a political advertisement that's effective at persuading you, let's say, away from Trump and towards Joe Biden, you're not just getting the information, you're also getting an emotional trigger, which is impactful in certain ways. When you're not just getting the information, you're also getting an emotional trigger, which is impactful in certain ways. When you're getting the news story, you feel like you're the

judge. And you don't even need to like say on a survey that you trust the New York Times that the New York Times delivered it to you. You're still consuming the information in a different way than when you are a political ad, because you're not thinking necessarily that you're being sold something unless you've really been sold that, you know, that news organization is a fake news media. And so that was really exciting. It also just, I personally did not want to be part of the problem anymore. I absolutely hated raising millions of dollars and then spending them on advertisements that I found to be, you know, we found to be effective. But that I felt like I was contributing to the longer term

challenges and problems as opposed to trying to figure out a way to build bridges with more Americans to be a part of the process and have agency. And that really means meeting them where they are and finding ways, again, to answer the question, what does this do for you? Because that's how most people live their lives. And I just don't think our political ads do that. So what are the newsrooms look like that you guys are running and how do they operate? Yeah, well, I should also I should also mention the obvious to your audience, but the right wing media is incredibly powerful, very large, very well resourced, and profitable in certain ways. So when I first started out peddling the idea of starting a progressive local news network, it was not very popular.

And a lot of people were like, you're never going to build the Fox of the left. And my answer to them, and it continues to this day, is that we don't need to. That's not the era that we're in right now. on very specific audiences that are not being reached by good factual information, or even just good information generally about what government does when it does good things. Reporters are not incentivized to do that. So Courier is built on this concept of we are reaching people who are not politically engaged very intentionally. We are reaching them through our newsrooms. So we have eight newsrooms. They are staffed by reporters and editors and social media content producers who live in these states and in these communities and who contextualize what's happening in D.C. or in their statehouse in a way that is very human and relevant to our audiences. These audiences are not going to pay attention to purely political or government-related news coverage.

That's the whole point. And so a lot of what our newsrooms actually do is what any newsroom does. They meet them with the content and the information that the audiences want, which has nothing to do with politics or government. And the way that we describe it is we weave in the vegetables. We build their trust. We build their engagement like any news organization does, and then we filter into their social news feeds, to their email newsletters that they subscribe to, other information that is important for them to have to vote and to feel empowered about the role

that they play in our democratic process. I wonder exactly how you do this, especially working with the algorithms that we have across the various social media platforms where people consume content and news today. So for this season of The Wilderness, I did another bunch of focus groups. I did a focus group of young voters in Orange County. They were all Biden 2020 voters, and now they're not sure what they're going to do and they're low sort of don't pay a lot of attention to the news yeah and i asked them where they get their news what outlets they get their news from and they looked at me when i said outlets they all sort of like looked at me like this and they're like we from social media from our from social media from and then one woman next to me said tiktok i got everything from tiktok and she actually

said she goes the news actually follows you you don't follow the news and so i was like oh what's on what's on your tiktok feed about about news and she said oh well there's this thing about biden where he was told he has a card in front of him that tells him to sit down and you know so maybe he's not all there and so that clearly broke through on on tiktok you know and then i was like um you know she started talking about how horrible the dobbs decision was and again this this person had voted for Joe Biden. And I said, well, are you registered in the upcoming midterm? And she said, what's a midterm? I said, what frustrates you most about the media?

And she said, I wish the media would offer more factual information about elections, who we're voting for, stuff like that. And I'm thinking, how do we get into her TikTok feed? How do we get into her TikTok algorithm? How do we get into her TikTok algorithm? Like, where do you even begin on that? I mean, that is the question every campaign should be asking and the world should be asking. And it's, I mean, it's truly not rocket science. I mean, you need to to TikTok's algorithm, which I should say for the audience, it's different than where Facebook and Instagram used to be, where they prioritize delivering your content to the people who followed you.

TikTok does the opposite. Only about 20% of your audience that follows you will get your content. And then 80% basically of its reach is to people who do not follow you. And so it's a real shift in social media generally that we're experiencing right now, where it's all about the best content that's going to get into most people's news feeds. And it's not about necessarily building long-term lasting relationships the way that the platforms were designed before. And so you have to identify the types of content, the types of formats, the types of music tracks, the types of individuals and storytelling formats that are getting the most reach. And you can look at this. There's all these platforms. You can pull up and see exactly what is going viral and why. And they're

giving a lot of tools right now, especially on the meta platforms for people to learn how to hit the algorithm right, because they want more people to invest in making their own vertical video content. So to get into that woman's newsfeed, you have to understand like, okay, where does she live? Because guess what? Geography is huge. TikTok algorithm on geo is huge because they know exactly where you're, you're logging into the app from. And so they will serve a lot of local content. There isn't a lot of local content. So that's something we're really excited about at Courier is that everything we do is local. And so that can actually drive a lot of engagement. And the other thing is figuring out what are the trending elements,

because they change constantly. And you need to catch the wave of the trends, and then you can see a lot of engagement. But to your larger point and what you heard in those focus groups, they're exactly right. The news has to come to them. The information has to come to them. And we have to capitalize more on moments that drive a lot of reach and engagement, even like the other side, like what you said about Joe Biden and like him falling off the bike and like Rehoboth, like that gets enormous reach from that. Our side is not thinking about that enough. How are we flooding the zone with moments and little snapshots of like, you know,

the other side and the other candidates and things of that nature and pushing them across and meeting these people where they are so it gets into the algorithm. Like pair anything that Doug Mastriano says with whatever trending song and I bet you can come up with some brilliant creative any day of the week in Pennsylvania on TikTok. So I don't think it's that difficult. The platforms are making it a little bit easier. You just have to believe that it matters. That's the first step. You think reclaiming the dark Brandon meme is helping?

Absolutely. It's not bad. Look, like everything else on the internet, some people take the joke and they just fucking just brutalize it to death. And then some of them have been very clever. Some people are very funny with it. I mean, I am not the target audience that needs moving on this, but there is one guy in my neighborhood who proudly waves his Let's Go Brandon flag, which has always triggered animosity when I drive by. In the past week or so, I've looked at it and I've been like, yeah,

let's go random. It works. It works. It totally works. It's all about the culture. So we're both former political staffers with well-known political views. Tommy and Lovett and I started a media company that's very explicit about those views. We don't hide anything. I feel like Courier is less explicit. What's your thinking there? We've worked really hard to be a lot more explicit in the past few years. But yes. Well, I was wondering like how you're – I mean because we always balance this and especially as – I think we're starting from a different place than you, which reach new audiences specifically people who are less engaged with politics altogether but still might have progressive values and you know so so we're going at it one way you kind of started with people who are less engaged like what what have you learned along the way on on how to sort of be transparent or

less so about that yeah god so much um I started my career as a journalist. I was not a journalist for very long before I became very enamored with then Senator Barack Obama and decided to leave journalism to work in politics. But I did have my foundational education and experience in it. And I so I understand journalists and journalism and their motivations because they have served me well throughout my career in terms of storytelling and integrity. And when we started Courier, I mean, it truly was, it was a total experiment. Like no one was going to hand me a billion dollars.

No one still today is handing me a billion dollars to build a massive media company, to be clear. But it was very much like I took evidence that we had from our testing to support the idea that this could be a really effective way at expanding the electorate, which I think is something that's also under-resourced generally in the democracy or progressive space. and yet we tend to still focus so narrowly on swing voters or independent voters in a few battleground states and I think that's just so harmful to our long-term goals and objectives so identifying something that could work that could build bridges with these communities that are that are at risk of not turning out at all was really really exciting to me and I knew that it was going to be incredibly difficult and so when I I started it, I didn't like, you know, I didn't have a business plan. I didn't think through the optics of this.

I just basically started to build out using the evidence that we had to support it and see if we could gain a little bit of traction. I could raise more money to turn it into a real thing. Turns out I did that. So after the 2020 election, I made the decision with my board at Acronym to fully dismember the two. And so that's where I would say that, you know, the criticism was very fair early on that it was not as transparent. And transparency is absolutely critical in journalism. You have to be transparent. So I wish that I had taken that page out of your all's playbook when you started Crooked to lean

really into it. I didn't. It was sort of it was like unsure if it was going to become a real thing and be a scalable company for the first year or so, I would say. So when it became clear that this could be something that I could scale, it was deeply important to me that I structured it in a way that we could be fully transparent about our values, our agenda, frankly, our funding sources, all of that stuff. So we did all of that in 2021. That really did essentially put to rest all of the criticism that we had. And that's why I had started Good Information Inc. too, was to be the acquirer, to actually purchase Courier, to make it independent. It's a huge challenge because I think you've identified this too.

I think the most important way to get people who don't pay close attention to politics to sort of engage is to build trust right and and and that's at the core of of all of this because what the right does and and what they do with disinformation and what what the war room does and all and and fox all kind of stuff, is they do sort of success. You know, it's a propaganda outlet, right? And the question is like, how do you have a progressive media infrastructure that does not mirror the propaganda

that we get on the right, but actually gives people useful information and also being honest about our values and what we want, but still build trust that way? I mean, that sort of is the ongoing challenge. And I feel like one of the reasons I started this podcast is the online world has made that trickier. Absolutely. And something else I say quite often is that I would never have started Courier. Courier would not need to exist, in my opinion, if I thought that the media was doing its job about actually informing the public

in a way that they want to be informed, in a way that is actually relevant to their lives. And that is not the media we have in America today, unfortunately. So like I have, I don't have as much criticism for traditional objective, quote unquote, objective media

as I do for right-wing media that intentionally spews lies and distrust. But I've got a lot of bones to pick with them. And frankly, I think that they are shirking on their responsibility to inform the public through their business models and through their obsession with elite audiences for both revenue and, I don't know, like feeling good about themselves and their peers. I don't know. So I think that we took on probably the hardest challenge. My investors agree. We talk about it quite often because I chose an audience that's really difficult to engage with any information related to politics or government. They're hard to find generally. And, you know, they're starting

at a place of mistrust or apathy, which also means it's a longer term engagement with them. And local was seen as a real challenge in the beginning. But actually, I think it's a huge advantage now. It's unfortunate that local news is dying in this country. It also means that even where it exists, though, they're not evolving to understand how people engage online and on social media. And that's entirely what we do. And so in terms of your question related to like, how do you not be propaganda, but how do you get this information to people? It's like, in a lot of ways, we're just filling the gap that traditional

objective media should be doing that they're not, which is just engaging people in very, very local, personal, human ways to get them information and content they want. And then we are taking that same approach to covering politics in elections, which is make it relevant to people and also get in front of them every single day and get in front of them every single day. And you have to build trust to do that. And that's what advertising programs

also don't do to their detriment because they're starting at square one every year. And when you build a brand that is trusted because it gives you value, it tells you what free things you can do with your kids on the weekends at the lake in Michigan or wherever you live in Maricopa County, Arizona. They're going to consume the content. And we know from our research that that's going to make a difference at informing them. So I think we're doing the work of the media in our model at Courier that I wish that they were doing more of. But we're certainly doing it with an agenda of getting more of these audiences to vote and to feel real agency in their vote. Last question I ask all our guests. What's your favorite way to unplug? I imagine you don't unplug that often um so live music all right i'm a live music freak yeah i moved to new orleans in the pandemic just to be able to have live music when you were in new orleans now i'm not currently you just moved during the pandemic that you did

yeah no i'm back in rhode island because thankfully our live music scene is back now but yeah live music my parents always said when i was a kid that music soothes the beast. So it's my unplug. Tara McGowan, thank you so much for joining Offline. This was fun and very informative. Thank you for doing it. Thanks, Tom. Always a pleasure.

Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis, sound engineer of the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Somenator, Michael Martinez, Andy Gardner-Bernstein, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.

Thank you.