A dozen years ago I finished a book entitled Power and the Story: How the Crafted Presidential Narrative Has Determined Political Success from George Washington to George W Bush. book's thesis was set forth in the second paragraph:The essence of American presidential leadership, and the secret of presidential success, is storytelling. From the earliest days of the American republic to the present, those seeking the nation's highest office had to tell persuasive stories- about the nation, about its problems, and, most of all, about themselves-to those who have the power to elect them. Once a president is in office, the ability to tell the right story, and to change the story as necessary, is crucial to the success of his administration. And once a president has left office, through either defeat or retirement, he often spends his remaining years working to ensure that the story as he sees it is the one accepted by history. Without a good story, there is no power, and no glory. (Cornog 1-2)The idea for the book came to me while reading Bernard Knox's introduction to Robert Fagles's translation of Iliad. Knox was discussing Simone Weil's great essay, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force. Weil writes, The human soul, in this poem, is shown always in relation to force: swept away, blinded by the force that it thinks it can direct, bent under the pressure of the force to which it is subjected (Weil, qtd. in Knox 29). Homer's stories, that is, carry messages and lessons-they encode an entire set of beliefs. And they do so as stories.I had just finished writing a history of American presidential campaigns, so the raw materials were ready to hand. perhaps slightly swaggering thesis paragraph quoted above came to seem to me pretty self-evident, and I set forth to illustrate the point. I looked at tales of youthful character-Lincoln the self-educating rail splitter, Kennedy the heroic PT boat commander, George W. Bush wasting his early manhood in too much alcohol and partying-and then examined other aspects of presidential careers. Throughout, I sought to explore the dialectic between the stories candidates try to tell-through campaign biographies, ads, speeches, convention-time films, and so forth-and the way the media push back, editing the stories that the politicians are spouting and digging for counternarratives of their own.What strikes me today, more than a decade after completing the manuscript, is how much the assumptions that underlay my book have changed. I still think storytelling is the central activity of American political life. But how those stories are told has changed dramatically because the communication landscape has been transformed through the rise of the Web, digital media, and, in particular, social media. If the centrality of stories has continued, the centrality of journalism now seems much less assured. And my own notion of how stories are constructed has changed as well.The old gatekeepers of the media sphere-in particular, newspapers, television news, and news magazines-have come under assault, both economically and intellectually. My book was published in 2004, and the idea that the important gatekeepers of political discourse were the journalistic leaders in those media still appeared not only reasonable but self-evident. But in fact the changes that are so obvious today were already well begun.The Rise of the WebOne thing storytellers like is neatness. And there is an elegant simplicity in the fact that two of the seminal events in the transformation being discussed here took place on Fridays a week apart in 1998. On Friday, September 4, a California-based company named for a mathematical concept, Google, was incorporated. A week later, September 11, 1998, the report to the House of Representatives by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who was investigating various allegations against President Bill Clinton, was released and posted, in its entirety, on the Internet. …