Impression: New Media in the

¶ … Impression: New Media in the 2008 Presidential Nomination Campaigns," the authors Haynes and Pitts open by indicating the main premise of the article: that the phenomena known as the "new media" are making a significant contribution to political campaigns today, in the same way that radio and television did so during their first years of existence. The main research question the authors addressed within this topic is whether the new media are effective tools to enhance the impact of campaigns for politicians, their parties, and their purposes.

The authors do not seem to have a particular model or theory to apply to the research question, or indeed any specific hypotheses as such. Instead, the research seems to focus upon observations of existing phenomena and drawing conclusions regarding the research questions from these observations. The research design then involved a survey of the existing literature as well as the new media to determine the nature of political Web sites, how politicians used them, and what their effect was on the public.

To determine the latter, a number of Website evaluation tools were used, including Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast. These are tools that analyze the reach and rank of Websites, thus indicating their actual ability to reach the public they were intended for. Rankings were also examined by Hubspot's Website Grader. These are extremely effective tools, as shown in the various graphic representations of information the authors provide. In this way, a comparison could be made among the Website used by candidates, and how effective these were in terms of their campaigns.

The authors found that Websites could be extremely effective in terms of providing information about a candidate, as well as raising money for campaigns. Because of the ease of contribution to an online environment, money raising sites were able to reach more potential contributors than more traditional forms of funding campaigns. This correlates well with the authors' earlier indication from existing surveys, that a large amount of voters made decisions to vote for or against a candidate on the strength of information found online.

The authors also found that more informal means of information dissemination, such as blogs and YouTube, were very effective in terms of winning support for rallies. The main reason for this is the increasing access of the public to the new media. Ultimately, the authors found that politicians who used the new media in creative and effective ways were those who also won the most votes.

Although the new media are certainly not the only influencing factor in determining the success or failure of a candidate, its prevalence in society today can hardly be overstated. Particularly, the political purposes of raising money, organizing volunteers and spreading information are areas in which the new media excel. The research design was therefore appropriate for drawing these conclusions, as it focused on Internet phenomena in terms of research questions and utilized Internet tools and information to arrive at.