Yesterday, President Obama sat down with YouTube's news and political director, Steve Grove, in the White House library to answer text and video questions posed by Americans all over the country. He fielded questions about small businesses, about college tuition, about the healthcare situation; they covered all the big issues. It was just another interview with just another person and nothing he said was particularly striking.
But it was important because it had never been done before.
It was the first live interview on YouTube of a sitting U.S. president, and the White House had no control over the user-submitted questions voted on by the American people. Whether you are a red right, a blue left or something in between, the politics doesn't matter. This is a big step forward for Washington.
The YouTube interview is one of many steps taken by the White House to reach tech-savvy Americans in Obama's first year in office.
Released by officials last week, "The White House" iPhone application is free and promotes the latest news, photos and videos of President Obama. It includes live video coverage of Obama's press conferences, behind-the-scenes photos at the White House and recent blog posts from WhiteHouse.gov.
Obama and his White House staff have also started hosting online town hall meetings, conducting live chats with top administration officials and now have their own YouTube channel with nearly 500 videos.
YouTube gets 100 millions hits a day. More than 21 million people have iPhones. That's a huge audience, and it's important that the White House, full of men and women from the pre-Internet generation, make a strong effort to reach that population.
More than 11,000 questions were submitted for the live event on YouTube yesterday, and over 64,000 votes were cast to decide which questions would be asked. If Obama starts doing this more often, people might cut out the middlemen – the TV stations like Fox News or MSNBC that tend to add their own hidden political agendas – and turn to their computers for video news straight from the White House.
While many college students will opt for a quick cute kitten video over another long speech about the issues, the information needs to be out there in an appealing and attractive medium.
Studies have shown that most online readers don't read left to right, sentence by sentence; they jump around the page to key words and phrases. Transcripts and press releases typed in their entirety aren't going to cut it online anymore; the audience needs audio and video stimulation.
Obama's administration has a lot of work to do on the big issues to find success, but with any luck, his modern influence on the White House will pave the road for the future.
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