If you happen to visit Rudi Giuliani's website today, or if you have in the past few days, you might find something surprising: He's still running for president! Now you may think: What? Is it true?
The answer would seem to be that yahoo has it correct when it reported a few days ago: Giuliani has dropped out of the race and has since endorsed John McCain as the republican nominee for the 2008 presidential election. Yet, someone in Rudy's campaign has not even updated the website with this information. My reaction, in short is: Wow. Is that possible in this day and age? Well yes and no. One would think that in an electronic world, the website would be one of the first communication chanels that would be changed to update the most current information. But sometimes it is the webmaster (or his or her suite of fellow associates) that are last to be given the go-ahead to change copy on a webpage.
This can occur for a few reason: First, web copy is a fickle thing. It either relates the immediate, or shows the thread-bare elbows due to a lack of care or over-care. In our collective efforts to see that what we say online is truly representative of what we mean, copy can be written and re-written multiple times before it can be considered 'representative'. For instance, how many times have we visited on-the-scene blogs only to find that these blogs haven't been updated in 2 or more years? The best-laid plans are often ditched because there are only so many hours in a day to achieve accomplishments. Blogs can wait if there's dinner to make.
Second: You can't print the truth until you know it's the truth -online. This isn't the case in print media. In that field, you encounter corrections, clarifications, explanations for text on a previous day or week that were found later to be misleading or untrue. In the web world, those misstatements are expected to be fixed immediately. That's a high standard for truth, and a difficult one to achieve each and every day. The amount of time needed to make sure that copy is accurate could often leave writers in tandem for days, afraid to print and afraid to stay quiet. Haste and accuracy are fighting for better position. Rudy's site is probably stuck in a similar position: Publish the obvious news, or write the 'dropping out of the presidential race' in the best way possible, THEN publish it.
Third: Why publish a lack of news? In this case, Rudy may not know his political future. There have been some internet rumblings that Giuliani may be a favorite as running mate for McCain. If so, why not wait and post THAT information on the Giuliani website? This is a strategic scenario which would be of great benefit to Rudy if his campaign were to shift to that of Vice President. The writers, media buyers and editors on the Giuliani campaign staff could very likely be in this position: wait and see.
In the meantime, however, anyone who wants to see the latest and greatest of Rudy's campaign highlights will have to be happy with the assumption that SOMEONE has 'told the webmaster', and that he or she is waiting by the computer for a signal - a good time to do some surfing on the web to see what's going on in politics.
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