This Monday, Matt Glazer graciously agreed to sit down with me at the Conjunctured offices for an interview. This was actually the second interview in as many weeks, as I managed to lose the entire recording of our initial interview in a feat of technological idiocy. As fate would have it, though, Matt won one of the 25 Texas Social Media Awards in the interim, which gave us an opportunity to discuss that award, his personal experiences with social media, the evolution of Burnt Orange Report from a LiveJournal diary to a nationally-recognized political journal, and his current role as New Media Director for the Lee Leffingwell Mayoral campaign here in Austin.

SV: I want to thank you for coming back to do this interview again after my technological breakdown.

MG: My pleasure.

Since we met last, you were awarded one of the Social Media Awards, so I wanted to congratulate you and the staff of Burnt Orange on that.

Thank you. Yeah, that was a big shock, looking at the people who were nominated. And I literally didn’t campaign. I sent a couple of text messages saying, “Hey, this is going on,” and the fact that I was one of the 25 and put in that company…

How did you find out that you were in the list of people being considered?

I got a Twitter message from somebody at the Statesman, so it was just kind of a surprise, because you look at people like Mike Chapman and Connie Reece and John Erik Metcalf who does this [ed. note, John Metcalf is one of the founding members of Conjunctured, where the interview took place]. There are some really big names in there, and people that I actually read and look up to in what they do. To be in that list of 25 is totally humbling. I could try to act like I’m faking it and be all cocky and confident, like oh yeah I’m great, but I’m 27 years old and I’m known for political stuff, not social media. To be in that list was incredibly amazing.

I’m glad you were in that list because I think it’s important that we don’t become the snake eating its own tail, and to have people who represent, for example, politics, and other fields, and not just social media marketing, networking that kind of thing.

Well I appreciate that. It’s just one of those things where I never have done this stuff and thought about it as a greater “whatever.” It’s just always been something I do, and something I have fun doing. I enjoy writing so I write. And I enjoy doing emails and making emails work and getting peoples’ input, so I do that for people. I like certain organizations to succeed, so I have Texas League of Conservation Voters, and CASA of Travis County. They asked for my help and I’m all too happy to do it, because I believe that children need to have a voice in the courts, and i believe the environment needs to be good and strong and clean and powerful. I’ve never actually thought about it in the sense of “I’m going to use social media.” It’s always just been, I don’t have enough money to be a philanthropist, so let me do what i can do, and this is what i can do. Looking at that list of 25 people, I never would have thought of myself that way, and now all of a sudden I guess I have to a little bit. It’s been weird because I’ve been awarded this thing, so I feel like I have to live up to something now.

I think if you just keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll live up to it just fine.

I hope so.

For the readers who aren’t familiar with the Burnt Orange Report, tell me a little bit about how that got started and how it’s developed.

It started in 2003 with Byron LaMasters and Jim Dallas and Andrew Dobbs. They were all at the University of Texas. They were watching all the stuff going on with Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff and the redistricting in the mid part of the decade. And they saw voter disenfranchisement going on, they saw the Democrats going to Ardmore and going to Albuquerque, and they were frustrated. So they typed about what they knew, which was the legislature, city of Austin politics, and the University of Texas. At the time, 200-300 people were looking at it. It was a LiveJournal, it was just kids talking about what they wanted. It was no different than a diary. And then from that it grew, and because of this kind of weird synergy of being one of the first sites to talk about politics and talk about it from an honest, open, organic perspective, and talk about getting access to people and talking with legislators and having that in, in five years it has grown to become a community site that has writers from across the state and country that write whatever they want to talk about. It has twenty to thirty thousand people who read it daily in various ways, and we talk about everything from Texas politics to Austin politics to Dallas politics, so we’ve really thought of ourselves as a growing statewide site that talks about Progressive politics and what we can change in Texas, but it all started because of this unconstitutional redistricting and a bunch of people getting frustrated, and from that frustration bred this really solid and wonderful Progressive community.

It reminds me a lot of MoveOn.org, which started from people wanting to “move on” from the impeachment process of Clinton and get on with the political action and change.

I think that’s really right on. I think when you get in that situation, especially in politics, when the pot starts to boil over, people become creative and they become so passionate that other people are drawn to that passion. I think what Adam Green and Eli and all those guys did with MoveOn was the exact same thing. People were just frustrated anyway. Here was this guy who was gonna unify and not divide, he was a “compassionate conservative,” and what did he do? He moved into Texas and flat out Tom DeLay said “We’re gonna redistrict the Democrats into oblivion. We’re going to destroy them.” And he tried to write districts that were for 109 Republicans out of 150 seats. They didn’t succeed, but they got really close. I think that frustration, especially here in Austin where, the Supreme Court called them the “fajita strip districts” of Austin all the way down to Hidalgo, I think people in Austin especially were really frustrated by that.

To have a good, powerful, strong organization you need to have a core germination, and sometimes it comes out of this feeling of protest and banding together to fight against something that feels really wrong, and that can keep you energized into so many other places.

It would have to. I mean, we don’t make money off the site. We’re going to start moving into that area where the site’s a business, but it’s a business we’re passionate about. But for five years we’ve been doing it for love, and if you can’t find passion in it, to write 1500 words a day is exhausting. I think people sometimes forget about how rough that really is. We were writing three to four times more than most paid journalists. It’s been interesting to see that development. The most interesting thing, though, is walking the Capitol now and seeing the support we give people. Like, the cover we give them, and the fact that we can be the pillars that prop them up to go out on the house floor or the senate floor and say no, this is wrong, and not only is this wrong, but just read this site and you can see how many people agree with me. It’s been interesting to see that materialize over four years, and see how the legislators read our site to see the pulse of the Progressive community. It’s clearly on both sides, because even the Republicans are wavering on certain key issues like vouchers, because they see that there’s just no support for it. So that’s been I think the most interesting thing that we’ve seen happen from Burnt Orange Report and TexBlog PAC, and all these facilities of online Progressive politics.

You tread the line between journalist and Progressive, and I mean obviously your site has a point of view, you aren’t a neutral journalist. How are you received and treated when you go to the Capitol as a blogger, as a journalist, as a Progressive. What’s it like?

I tend to be a little bit more hard on myself than the press corps does. I think of ourselves as the Texas Observer, and The Nation. I think that we have journalistic standards because we implement a two source rule, we implement that we don’t go off of two anonymous sources. If we are talking to people and they won’t go on record, we don’t go with a story. We fact check as much as possible. If we can’t give the fact, we give the source of that fact, and say we’ve heard from so-and-so that this has happened. So I come from that journalism background, and the reason for that isn’t because we want to be taken real seriously, or because the site needs to have that integrity. It’s because we’ve spent five years making the site what it is, and it takes one day of really bad reporting and really bad storytelling to destroy our credibility. I think the press corps realizes that. Phil Martin does great analysis on everything from the Texas Speaker’s race to congressional races to what policies are moving and how they’re moving, and he spends a week or two weeks on most of his pieces. He goes through and reads the studies and makes sure that they’re sourced. Karl-Thomas Musselman, our publisher, writes really in-depth stuff on electoral politics and trend lines. And those, you know you’re lucky because you have the facts right there for you. But the second we start reporting the rumors, and we report rumors as fact, we’re in a bad spot. I mean, we’ve been lucky that we’ve been right more than we’ve been wrong, but the beauty of blogs, unlike traditional journalism, is that when we get it wrong we put it up on the front page of the site just as long as we’ve had the wrong facts up, and say we got this wrong, and here are the reasons why, and we won’t let it happen again. So I think that we’re taken pretty seriously, but there’s also some things we’ll never get. We’ll never get access to Tom Craddock’s office or Warren Chisholm’s office, and the really far right Republicans are never gonna talk to us. David Beckwith was outed on our site as being an anonymous blogger who was pushing his clients. We said look, David Bucksmith is David Beckwith. Read everything he’s writing with a grain of salt. And the Cornyn campaign said, “Oh, and I guess you’re gonna tell us that the Easter bunny and Santa Claus don’t exist either.” And that was the access we got. We got made fun of. We don’t think we’re ever gonna get any more than that from them; that’s fine. The traditional press can get that access and we’ll take the cues from them and continue to do what we do.

Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about the mayoral campaign, specifically your involvement with the Lee Leffingwell campaign. you are…what’s your title now?

It’s very organic. New Media Director or Consultant for Social Media, whatever.

What does it mean to be a New Media Director for a mayoral campaign in Austin?

It’s a lot of building tools and a lot of reading, but not a lot of implementation. Because of my connection with Burnt Orange Report and that Progressive sphere it’s kind of a touch and go thing. I don’t want to put the site at risk, and I don’t want to put the campaign at risk, so I don’t implement any of the tools. But I do look at what is working and what is good for the campaign, and figure out things that they should try to increase the public sphere, the input, the way they reach out to voters from across the city.

So what’s working for you so far?

The two biggest ones have been YouTube and Twitter. We came up with an idea with our Twitter account that it would be disingenuous to say that TheLeeTeam was just Lee Leffingwell. And so @TheLeeTeam is actually the entire campaign, and as a super volunteer comes in, or a grassroots advocate comes in, or an endorsing group comes in, we just expand and expand and expand. So it’s me, our political director, our consultant, our campaign manager. And we all write with our initials so you know exactly who it is, and we really just say exactly what’s going on. Last weekend we went to Pease Park and planted a bunch of trees, and it was AE, and JD, and SS: “Planting trees at Pease Park, come check us out.” Because we want people to know what we’re doing, and we don’t want the campaign to be this weird thing that people are being talked at by. We want to have a conversation, and we do. And we simply reply to everybody, we respond to the direct messages, we want people engaged and seeing what we’re doing from database entry to planting trees in Pease Park. It’s been a fun way to play with Twitter in that new kind of campaign way.

I thought it was brilliant, and the reason why I wanted to interview you was specifically because of that Twitter account, because I hadn’t seen that done before. I’m not sure if you invented it or not, but I was really impressed to know who exactly it was who was speaking. Are you having conversations on that Twitter stream? Or is it really just little bulletins?

No, when people reply with us, or if people send a message, we try as hard as possible to respond as many times as we can, and keep those conversations going. The campaign really is about Austin, and about doing what’s good for Austin, and we’re in tough times, and no one denies that. The budget at the City Hall just shrunk by 20 million dollars. We don’t know where that money is going to be cut, we just know it’s not there anymore. So we want to hear from people. We want them to say, “Oh, you’re planting trees at Pease Park, if you do this again can you go to Waterloo Park.” “Oh, hey, don’t cut funding here, here, and here.” We want it to be a two-way stream, and we want people to know that there are real people on the other side of this Twitter account, it’s not some blog interface SMS update thing, as we update the website it automatically goes to Twitter. It’s not that. We have to remind ourselves that we need to tell people what’s going on. And what we’ve actually seen is that people will come into our office and say who’s AE, or who’s MG. We’ll have real life conversations based on the Twitter account, which is the coolest thing in the world. That’s been the neat thing for us. We’ll go to a Democratic club thing and someone will ask for us by initials, and say, why did you say that? Why are you so excited about this? And to me that’s like the TexBlog PAC. It’s taking offline actions and making them online so people can see them in a broader way; but the flip side, which is the more important, which is the online actions that seem to be in this non-public sphere, taking those offline and having that engagement in the community. It’s been so cool to see that.

Ultimately I think that’s what New Media is about, is enabling actual people to actually interact. Not to just create one gigantic network of people who only know each other through Twitter and blogs.

And that’s been the problem. Even in the blog community, there are people, you go to Netroots Nation and you know them as their handle or their email account, and it’s like wow, it’s so great to put a name and a face and a blog together. And that’s been the fun thing in the Progressive blog community over the past few years, because that’s really been happening in a rapid and organic way. But Twitter doesn’t do that. Because of this Texas Social Media Award I’ve got like 600 people following me on Twitter, and I’ve never met any of them except for the 120-200 people that I’m following. And it’s been really fun to see that growth, but at the same time I kind of want to send them all a message and say I don’t know you so let’s all get together and have a party.

Well that’s what a tweetup is.

And I’m going to start going to those. That’s been the fun thing about this, too, is that I’m now getting plugged into the Social Media Club and the tweetups and the twestivals. I haven’t been to any of these things, and now I’m becoming more engaged. And the campaign has shown that too. The more engaged you are in Social Media, the more engaged you are in the social aspect of it. There’s a direct correlation, and I think people forget that sometimes. You have to go offline with it. You have to see the human interactions and you have to meet these people, otherwise they’re a handle and a picture, and you never really fully appreciate what they’re writing.

We talked earlier, the last time we met, about transparency and your Twitter stream, but also just in general, transparency and openness in communication in the running of a campaign. Can you ever be too transparent? And how do you navigate those waters?

It’s funny, a week ago I was kind of like, yeah, you can get burned by it. I now fully embrace it. I think that there’s no bad thing about being totally transparent. I don’t think there’s a bad thing about being honest and open. I think that good government and good campaigns and good candidates come from being out there. I mean, one of the things we saw on the national level is that Barack Obama would stand up and say, you know, I got this wrong, and I’m sorry, and I’m not going to do it again, or I’ve learned from my mistake. If it’s good enough for the president, why is it not good enough for City Hall? And why is it not good enough for county commissioner, why is it not good enough for a state rep? I think that there might be some missteps along the way. You might share too much and your opposition might see too much. But the flip side of that is it also means that the average people that are engaged and watching and curious see the same thing. They see that you’re going to this club meeting tonight but not this one. They see why. They see the stream of consciousness in a good way. So, ask me that question a week ago, I was kind of on the fence. Now after conversations I’ve been having about just our Twitter stream, no, I think transparency is always good, I think openness is always good. I think there is no downside. And I think you can look at it from a political perspective and say, oh that’s scary, we’re giving so much out there. But clearly the people are responding to that. Since the last time we met we have 216 more people following us on Twitter, and all we did was be honest with them. Our email list is continuing to grow, our Facebook group is continuing to grow, and that’s only because we’re not regulating the information we give out. We’re giving out as much information as we can in the limited time we can do it. And I think it needs to go from campaign to City Hall. I think it should follow the candidate from candidate to elected official. Because if it’s this good for them as a candidate, it can only be good for us once they’re actually elected.

Let’s talk about YouTube, because you mentioned Twitter and YouTube as being the two most important tools for you right now. How are you using YouTube, and how is it working for you?

What we did first is a video montage of the campaign kick-off. In that you saw us tease a little bit about why people are supporting Lee Leffingwell for mayor. We had 230 people show up to this kickoff, it was huge. So we just started asking people, “Why are you here?” We didn’t give them any cues or anything. And we got some great stories. Stories about Waller Creek, stories about transportation, stories about the air, stories about their jobs, stories about their families, stories about health care. I mean, there were so many different reasons why these people were there that we are now going to go through the process of sharing those stories. And yeah, it’s going to say Lee Leffingwell in the background or in the foreground, or they might mention the name, but the reality of it is we’re taking those two hundred and something stories and we’re listening to them. I mean, after that we started really going aggressive on a project promotion called Austin Corps, which is about getting the community to volunteer for a year. Getting them in internships, like young high school and college kids, doing things for the music community here in town, to do stuff with the environmental community in town, to do volunteer service projects, and doing it in a way that benefits the city. We probably wouldn’t have done that as a hard campaign push if there hadn’t been so many projects that people were so passionate about. We’re going to put those stories up on YouTube, and we’re going to promote that. We’ve got a Flip camera. I follow the Council Member around as much as possible. We want raw, uncut footage of what he’s saying because people can’t be at all the events, they can’t be at all the club meetings, and we want people to hear from him, himself, without a filter, without a spokesperson, without the media. And if they agree with the Leffingwell campaign and Lee’s message, then great, and if they don’t then you know what, there’s other candidates, they can go vote for them. But it’s better for them to hear from the candidate’s own mouth than to hear the ten second soundbite that someone puts together for them.

It sounds very organic, much the way that you use your Twitter stream. You don’t have necessarily a schedule or a weekly speech, or anything like that, it’s really just more stuff as it comes up you post?

I think that’s the best way to do it. I think that’s the most honest way to do it. I can sit there and say 11 o’ clock, 1 o’ clock and 3 o’ clock I’m gonna tweet something, and we’re gonna do the same thing with the Leffingwell campaign. But the reality of it is I’m a fan of the Netroots Nation stuff, I’m on their advisory panel. We have 15, 20 tickets left at student prices for 50 dollars. It’s more important for me to get that out there, and not do it on my schedule, than it is for me to follow a schedule and follow some sort of pattern. I don’t think there’s any study that proves that it’s not worth getting the information out there faster instead of having a schedule. That’s a tension to me that I’ve never understood. And if someone wants to follow a schedule I’m not gonna knock ‘em, but that’s just not my style.

Matt, I want to thank you very much for coming by, and good luck to you and to Council Member Leffingwell and his campaign.

Thank you so much.

(note: this interview was conducted as part of a weekly series of blog posts I will be writing for the Austin Social Media Club. All posts will be cross-posted here as well.)