Fireside YouTube chat?
This isn’t your grandfather’s fireside chat. President-elect Barack Obama plans to tape a weekly address not just for radio listeners, as presidents have for years, but for YouTube Internet viewers too.
Connecting the White House hearth to the American home, President Franklin D. Roosevelt talked to the people through the radio during the Great Depression, with crackling broadcasts delivered near a crackling fire. Presidents Kennedy and Reagan mastered television.
For Obama, who built a big part of his campaign on the Internet, it’s YouTube.
Obama recorded a four-minute address at his transition office in Chicago to be posted today through a YouTube link on his transition website, www.change.gov.
He and members of his administration will continue to do the videos after he takes office Jan. 20.
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