US Odyssey of the Guardian’s blogger

Armed with a laptop and a mobile phone with built-in GPS and a photo camera, Kevin Anderson, the Blogs Editor for the UK Guardian newspaper goes to the United States to understand presidential elections and start a debate.

Kevin will drive 6400 kilometres (4000 miles) to learn what is guiding American voters’ decisions, to explain their concerns and hopes to the Guardian’s readers and the rest of the world while also bringing voices from around the world to Americans.

His long journey proves that online journalism is not about sitting at the office and googling for facts. Kevin is going to do an old-fashioned reporting - meeting real people and talking to them - but he will use all the gadgets of the new media - Twitter, Flickr, Dopplr, Twibble, TwitPic, YouTube, Fire Eagle and others.

What is also unique - he thinks as much about a story he wants to report, as about the community of readers he wants to engage with this story. 

“I dream of bringing together people from around the world to have a conversation about the US elections, and in 2008, that’s possible with some very inexpensive technology. It all starts with the assumption that this is journalism, that bringing together people from around the world to discuss current events is a powerful new journalistic tool,” he explains in an interview with forum4editors.com’s Grzegorz Piechota. 

Kevin agreed to share  with us an exciting story of his past adventures and plans for the new one.

forum4editors.com: Tell me about your journey. What do you want to learn in the United States - as a journalist who plans to cover the elections and as a journalist who is so excited about new technologies?

Kevin Anderson: As a journalist, it’s valuable to get out and talk to real people. I’ve lived in capital cities for the last 10 years - Washington and now London. I’ve learned that people view politics very differently outside of capital cities. In capital cities, in the bubbles of Washington and Westminster, politics is the centre of everyone’s lives. Outside or capital cities, few people make their living in politics so it’s much more peripheral. Politicos in capital cities think that this means people aren’t engaged. That’s not true. Politics is people’s job security, the price they pay for petrol and whether their children have good, safe schools. It’s at once more concrete while also being more distant. I want to know what is guiding American voters’ decisions when they cast their vote. 

But my main role on this trip is to play the host in a global, networked conversation. This election, even more so than in 2000 or 2004, I can now connect not only with people I meet on the road, but I can also add the voices of people from all over the world. I can get an e-mail on my Blackberry or via Twitter on my mobile phone and put a question from half way around the world directly to an American voter. As an American who has been in London for all but a few months since the last election, I want to both explain the election to the rest of the world while also bringing voices from around the world to American voters. It’s a rare opportunity. 

I’ll be travelling with a Guardian Film team who will be producing several videos during the week and also longer pieces for television. Investigative reporter James Ridgeway and I will be doing rolling reports on a blog, via Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. But the main role of the blog is to host a conversation not only among American voters but people around the world who are curious about the US election.

In 2000, I travelled with a compact satellite dish and a mini-DV camera to webcast live from locations around the US, but we didn’t have the ability to take people’s questions as we were webcasting. We had to print them out. In 2004, I blogged, but the technology we used was relatively primitive, even when compared to real blogging technology  of the day. This time, I’ll be using high-speed wireless data technology, GPS and the latest mobile phone applications to constantly be in touch with people around the world as we tell stories using video, audio, text and pictures. We want to give our audience the sense of being on the trip with us and connect them with people across the United States. 

The other major change in the last four years is just what’s possible with free or low cost web services. It makes the journalism so much easier, while also freeing our content from our site, allowing us to sprinkle it all over the web to reach a much wider audience. We’ll be using YouTube to help augment our own video publishing platform because we need to take our content to where our audience is. We’ll be using Twitter for its ease of use and also again to involve people in a broader network. We’ll be using GPS to geo-tag almost every piece of contact we create. We’ll be publishing photos on Flickr and mapping them on Google Maps so that people get a sense of where we’re at.  Hopefully, our trip will become the centre of a networked conversation happening all over the world about the US elections and the critical issues involved. 

Where do you go and when? What is the plan for the trip? 

We’re still putting the final touches on the itinerary, and we’ve got to leave a little flexibility in terms of trying to catch up with the candidates occassionally along the way. But the journey will take us more than 6400 kilometres (4000 miles) and at least 14 states across the US. The trip kicks off 5 October in Los Angeles. We travel across California to Las Vegas Nevada, then down into John McCain’s home state of Arizona, across New Mexico and up to Colorado. We’ll then travel across Kansas, Missouri before heading north to Chicago, Illinois, the home town of Barack Obama. We’ll drop down through Indiana before hitting the crucial battle ground state of Ohio. We’ll stop in Pennsylvania and West Virginia before ending our trip in Washington DC where we’ll make trips to neighbouring states Virginia and Maryland. 

We’ll see a huge range of the United States, but the fact that we’ll only see 14 states reinforces how large the US is.  We’ll travel from the west coast through the desert Southwest up the Front Range of Rockies before travelling across Kansas in the Great Plains. We’ll see the corn fields of the Midwest (where I’m from) and cross the Appalachian Mountains. We’ll start the trip looking west over the Pacific and end up in the east looking out over the Chesapeake Bay that opens up into the Atlantic Ocean. 

How do you prepare yourself for this journey? I know from your blog that you are testing a new mobile etc., but could you tell me from A to Z what you really do?

The Guardian Films team have been working for months on the logistical details for the filming, and we’ve all been jointly working on the editorial details. For months, as part of my work with the Guardian’s US news blog, Deadline USA, and as part of that, I’ve been reading voraciously from a wide range of news sites and blogs as well as following politically oriented Twitter and YouTube users. I’ve been adding the stories and blog posts I read to the Guardian America del.icio.us account as both a feature of our site and a resource for myself and other staff members. 

I’ve also been testing equipment and web services for the trip so that there are as few surprises as possible on the road. I also know that we’ll be juggling hours of driving each day and also the the job of journalism. One thing that we’re doing on this trip is focusing on geo-tagging all of the content. To the greatest extent possible, we’ll add location data for every video, every picture, every blog post and every Twitter message. People following the trip will be able to see where we are at in near real time.

I’ve been testing a Nokia N82 with built-in GPS to automatically geo-tag my photos. I will in some instances upload the images directly and immediately from the phone. I will also be using a GisTeq PhotoTracker and a Nikon D70 to add geo-data to high quality images. The PhotoTracker comes with software that adds the geo-data to the image files and will upload them to Flickr or create Google Maps picture galleries.I’ve been testing Twibble, a great location aware Twitter client. I can also upload pictures directly to TwitPic to allow our Twitter followers to keep track of the trip. The trip has spurred internal development work that will allow us to add geo-data to content in the Guardian content management system. 

I’ll be using Twitter, Google Maps, Flickr and YouTube. I might also try to use Dopplr, a travel-based social network, and Fire Eagle, a Yahoo location-based service that should make it easier to update my location along the way. 

I think geographical information is important to this story. It will give people another way to navigate the story.  If will give people a sense of where the posts come from in the real world. You’ll see pictures from across the United States showing the varied people and landscape.

What troubles do you consider that make you hard to fall asleep? 

I assume that the technology will not always work as advertised. That’s the nature of technology. 

What keeps me up at night is building the community, the conversation around the trip. I’m already reaching out to people using my personal blog and through Twitter and Flickr. We’ll launch the blog on the Guardian site after the Republican Convention ends, but we’re not waiting for people to come to us. I’ve been reaching out to bloggers, vloggers and other people using social and citizen media for weeks now. In 2004, we still thought about creating a site or a blog, but four years later, you can’t expect people to come to your site. You have to go where they are and involve them. This is the only way to make the conversation as broad as possible. 

And when you finally get asleep, what are you dreaming about? What kind of story would you love to tell during your Odyssey?

I’m dreaming that I will be able to pull together this distributed conversation. This is the third US election that I’ve done a project like this, and I’ve learned that you have to start reaching out to people early.

I dream of bringing together people from around the world to have a conversation about the US elections, and in 2008, that’s possible with some very inexpensive technology. It all starts with the assumption that this is journalism, that bringing together people from around the world to discuss current events is a powerful new journalistic tool. 

I also dream of getting people involved in talking about the issues not just the ‘horse race’ of which candidate is ahead. I’ve seen how people do want to talk about issues, about the economy, healthcare, immigration and foreign policy. We have the possibility to show people the United States in an entirely new way as we travel and involve them in this trip. That’s exciting. We also have the possibility to help people around the world interact with average Americans. The kind of story that I want to tell is to help Americans tell their stories and let them explain their election and their choices to the rest of the world, while the rest of the world can talk to Americans about the impact of their election to the rest of the world. 

Tell me, please, about your past journeys. Where did you go and when? What did you do there?

This is really an extension of what I did in 2000 and 2004 for the BBC. In 2000, we called it the Election Challenge, and was it challenging!

BBC TV correspondent Tom Carver and I took an M4 portable satellite dish, a webcasting unit and a mini-DV camera to five locations across the United States in five days. From Monday through the following Saturday, we travelled 10,460 km (6500 miles). We asked the web site visitors what they wanted to know about the US elections. They were curious about voter apathy, especially among young voters, so we talked to university students in Miami. We had to balance the satellite dish off the balcony of a bar to get a signal. We then travelled to Austin to talk to people who had served in state government with George W Bush to get a sense of the then relatively unknown candidate. 

The webcasting gear developed a fault en route to Texas so I had to call an engineer in London and perform ’surgery’ on it in a car park outside of Austin. I finally brought it back to life with some coaching. I had the kit in pieces across the roof of the hire car and the dish on the boot of the car sending the video back to London from a DIY store car park. One of the store workers asked me what I was doing, and I said, “We’re feeding video to London.” The amazed worker said: “No shit?!” He was very helpful in keeping people from walking in front of the dish and interrupting the transmission. 

We missed a flight to San Francisco and then got delayed by the famous Bay area fog. We finally made it and drove across the bay to talk to an electronic voting expert. Little did we know the voting problems that would happen in that election. The next morning we interviewed supporters of the Green Party because visitors to the website wanted to know about so-called ‘third parties’ in US politics. Then we rushed to the airport to catch a flight to Chicago. We interviewed suburban ’soccer moms’, a key demographic in that election. 

In 2004, the road trip built on what we did in 2000. We didn’t focus on video. Webcasting seemed so 2000. Now it was blogging.

Again, all along the trip, we took questions from people. In 2000, mobile phone technology made it difficult for us to check our email on the road, but by this time, it was much easier.  The BBC didn’t actually have a blogging platform at the time so we just used our own content management system. Producers in London managed the comments and flagged up interesting questions from readers. I kept a running tally of miles and cups of coffee. I’ll probably do the same this time around.

We travelled to Detroit to talk about the economy and health care. We travelled to Colorado to meet with social conservative voters in Colorado Springs and liberal voters in Boulder, often called the People’s Republic of Boulder by locals who view it as radically left of most of the US. We returned to Texas talking not only to Republican supporters of George W Bush but also to Latino voters in San Antonio, a rising power in American politics. We stopped in Nashville Tennessee to talk to Iraq War veterans who had fallen through the cracks on their return home and become homeless. One final stop in Florida to cross that battleground state and try to tell which way it might go. Blogging is a natural way to cover these kinds of trips. 

It was clunky and difficult last time. I had to e-mail my posts back to London to be posted by a producer there. This time not only will I be able to update the blog myself but I’ll also be able to easily post status updates via Twitter and pictures via Twitter with a DSL-class mobile wireless card. That will be a game changer. 

Tell me about a person who inspired you to these journeys?

Nic Newman, who now helps build technology to support journalism at the BBC, had the idea for the road trip in 2000, and Steve Herrmann, who is now editor of the BBC News website, asked me to blog initially for the US political conventions four years ago. 

The BBC had been doing its Talking Point programme for years where it allowed people around the world to email, text or call in their questions to major world figures. Our trip in 2000 asked BBCNews.com visitors around the world to set the agenda. What did they want to know about the US elections? We then put their questions to the people we interviewed. 

Was it hard to convince you to go?

It was easy. I was excited to try something new, and I really believe in the basic premise of the trip that it’s important to involve the audience. 

What were your concerns at that time?

The first trip was just a mad dash across the US. We spent a lot of time in airports, and we were lucky only to miss one flight. The webcasting equipment was temperamental. Four years ago, it was a much slower pace. We had more time to work, but we had to rely on producers in London for a lot of the work. I’m glad that we can do so much in the field this time. 

What did you learn about America during all those journeys? 

I was reminded just how big the US is. It’s a huge place.

And there is this famous quote in American politics by former speaker of the House of Representatives ‘Tip’ O’Neill: “All politics is local”. 

It’s so true in the US. People think about very local issues when they are voting, and even in 2004, the war in Iraq might have been the foremost issue for our international audience, but it wasn’t for most American voters.

And what did you learn as a journalist and as a person? What turned to be the most difficult? And what was much easier than you thought before you had departed?

I am often reminded on these trips just how big the US is. Seriously, the biggest challenge for the first trip was the pace and the logistics. I bought my first Palm Pilot after that trip because it forced me to be better organised. It helped me manage my contacts and my calendar. It was a lesson that really improved my journalism, and it made me generally much more efficient. 

However, I still feel that travelling 10,640 in six days was too much. I felt like we saw more of American airports and than of the American people. We managed to cram a lot in those six days, but I felt like we were able to do more journalism in the 17 days we took the last time. 

The first trip the technology was also a much bigger challenge. Without much time to find a good position, we had to find a place where the satellite dish had a clear view of the sky. Fixing the webcasting kit in a car park wasn’t something that I had planned on. 

The last time it was easier than I had expected to get people engaged. I think part of that was because I was blogging in the summer at the conventions and had an opportunity to connect with people before the trip started. That’s one of the reasons why we’re starting the blog this time a month before we start the trip. It will take time and a lot of outreach to build a community around the trip. 

Could you please share some tips for people who would like to take a challenge like yours? What should they avoid? What should they remember?

Don’t try to do too many things, not in terms of journalism, but in terms of new technology. Most of what I’ll be doing, I either do on a daily basis or have tested quite a bit before I leave. Also, make sure that you spend as much time doing journalism as you do travelling.

Thank you very much and good luck.

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