leaving New Hampshire

I've spent the day mulling what I learned here. For one, I learned a great deal about how reporters are using social media, especially Twitter, in covering this campaign. The ironic fact is that Twitter is ubiquitous, yet not really integrated into reporters' work in any systematic way--except for "lurking" on Twitter, as one reporter calls it, which they all seem to do. Twitter has become the new circulatory system of the journalistic body politic. Every reporter knows instantly what their colleagues and competitors are seeing and thinking. That puts pressure on them to figure out how to distinguish their work from others', how to go beyond the basic facts that (it seems to them) "everyone already knows." And it means that repetitional clout is increasingly measured by the number of followers and retweets one gets. Beyond that, campaign reporters are using Twitter in idiosyncratic ways, and many expressed concerns to me about its effects on the quality of reporting.

I also learned that New Hampshire is very cold, even when the locals think it's not.