Thread by @farrahbostic

This thread + discussion is fascinating, in large part because most of the discussion misses Rosen's argument almost completely. He's questioning the entire _premise_ of election reporting, and the responses seem not to have noticed. @jayrosen_nyu
twitter.com/i/moments/1084…

For my planner/researcher/strategist friends, it's like this:
A client wants you to test three product or campaign ideas. They've done no exploratory or observational research, and they haven't been thoughtful about the category for a few decades.

The three concepts are, Faster, Cheaper & Y'know-for-kids!

You say to them, hey, so the culture, category, consumer behavior have really changed. The things you've been making for years are struggling because people need something different. We should talk to folks about *that*

Also, the things you make have some problems. They're, unpopular, bad for people, the environment, society, etc. Maybe we should look at that before we launch another version/line extension.

They respond: "Oh, you want to test features & positionings. We already do that."

"No, we want to understand the current context, maybe come up with something else you can do or make that isn't bad for people, something they'll really like and see value in."

"Ok," they say. "But we already know what everyone will say. They want it faster/cheaper/for kids."

"Well, we're not going to go ask what features they want or what they think you should tell them to get them to buy it. We're going to go observe and explore the whole category and maybe some adjacent ones, too."

"But what will that tell us about the things we want to test?"

You're trying to shift the client away from their orientation (testing features) towards a different mindset (understanding customers in context). The client will not be shifted. They don't accept your premise and you don't accept theirs.

Now, I'm on your side in this. But.

But some client is going to say to you all the right words and *still* think you're talking about testing features. They're going to greenlight your approach.

And then it's going to go very, very badly.

They won't hear what they want to hear. They'll cope by being literal.

Worse, they'll tell you they already knew all this stuff, but it doesn't help them figure out how to launch their not-new products. So you see, YOU failed THEM. And by extension, your whole approach was bad. They're not going to 'waste money' on that kind of thing again.

That's what I see in the conversation around Rosen's post. A bunch of people mistaking a Citizen's Agenda for a list of "issues", bc they aren't policy reporters, they're campaign reporters. As far as they know, campaigns are horseraces, campaign reporting is offtrack betting.

So maybe the trick is saying, this is a third kind of thing. There's policy/issue reporting, there's campaign coverage, and there's citizen's agenda reporting. It's a whole new category, completely different in every way from ordinary political reporting.

My guess is that if you pull people off the campaign coverage to do the citizen's agenda work, they're going to start with polls. This is a category error. You'll start by dividing up the electorate by either demographics or issues. But Rosen is talking about discovery.

You can't poll test your way to a thing you haven't already thought of. And demographic classifications tend to lead towards stereotypical issue assignment. You will create the conditions in which you are never surprised, and will conclude that you were right all along.

And we're right back where we began. It's not that issues or likelihood of victory don't matter - it's that they're not the only things that matter, and it's that how people assemble their lists of issues or bets on winners/losers is influenced by other stuff that gets ignored.

I had a boss that liked to talk about 'walking around the problem'. That, it seems to me, is what Rosen is describing. It also seems to me to be something that a lot of political reporters and commentators seem to want to avoid. Predictability is a powerful drug. /end