New Media Prof Blog

The Online President

Posted on 26. Mar, 2009 by admin in For Students, New Media

The website says ‘The White House is Open for Questions.’  And today, President Obama had his first presidential virtual town meeting. Anyone can ask the President questions online. I am encouraged that this President clearly understands the power of new media beyond the campaign initiatives used to help get him elected. I applaude it for many reasons, not the least of which is that it gets people involved in our government with interactivity or at  even to the point of submitting a link of you asking a video question. They tell us 100K questions were submitted with no pre-screening. The production looks pretty good – I counted about 4-5 cameras switched into the live feed.  No hiccups in the live stream, so clearly they’ve got the technology part of scaling to volume viewers and bandwidth covered. However, at more than 10-minutes in, we are still listening to Obama’s sales pitch (did he forget he was already elected?) Now finally getting to the first question, which came from Boston (that’s where I am) was about education. Second question - re-financing home mortgages.  Third question – jobs.  And hallelujah – a question about tax breaks for small business owners who depend on bank loans to run the operation. We’re told that the questions chosen for a Presidential answer were chosen by the  numbers of votes cast (3.5million votes) that bring that question to the top, courtesy Google analytics. And in a moment that spawned laughter in the live audience, the President explained that the question about legalizing marijuana got a lot of votes but his answer was ‘no’ in terms of that being part of the  administration’s economic strategy. BTW, Google powers today’s town hall and all of the techno that led up to it including online question submission, etc). Yesterday, a writer from WebProNews called it A Google Spangled White House Town Hall, which is a valid point. And the PR machine is working overtime with videos on the White House website. But back to today’s point, I think the Online Town Hall is a good start. As a former TV producer, I would have a few comments about shortening the answers to get more questions in during the 30-minutes I’ve been watching. I actually have a business to run, so my time available to watch anything, is short, as a small business person. I’d like to see the format be more rapid-fire Q&A, preserving, of course, the answer content. The live nature of the town meeting is good and kudos for all involved for making it technically seemless. And it is obvious that the audience target is those Millennials who were tapped in mass during the Obama campaign. I think all of this is long overdue. Gone are the days when only traditional media has access to the President of the U.S. and gone are the days that our connection as the public only comes through soundbites. I think it is important for our President to stay connected to us all…because we ARE watching very carefully!

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Tags: New Media, obama, white house town hall