Good article that sums up Obama's approach to online video and its tremendous significance in politics to come:
Since Obama was elected, the White House new-media-operations team has supplied YouTube with Obama’s “Your Weekly Address” videos, among other clips. The channel is regularly among YouTube’s most viewed and most subscribed. Beginning on Jan. 24, the president has appeared in various gilded White House parlors, speaking mostly about the economy. He eschews preamble, “God bless America” and other stock presidential rhetoric. In these clips, Obama usually starts with brisk optimism and then falls into a somber acknowledgment of the nation’s straits. Other times he runs the bad-good news in reverse....
When past politicians have been praised for their “use” of media, they’re often seen as having deftly orchestrated an advantageous relationship with the press — having somehow won them over, as democratic politicians might generally aim to do. Obama’s team, in producing and distributing more video (by far) than any past administration, has not so much won over political journalists as led the pack to become the new media on the White House beat. Does that strike anyone as unsettling?
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