US media ramps up for new White House
Website to field largest team
Agence France-Presse
First Posted 12:41:00 11/16/2008
Filed Under: Internet, Media, US elections
WASHINGTON--As president-elect Barack Obama prepares to take over the White House, US media outlets are ramping up coverage plans for a tech-savvy administration equipped with a powerful New Media toolkit.
And reflecting the changing media landscape, for the first time ever it will be a website -- not a news agency, a magazine or a newspaper -- which will have the largest team of writers covering the White House.
Politico.com, a US political news start-up which has soared in popularity since its launch 22 months ago, announced plans in September to assign six full-time reporters to cover the Obama administration.
"These are important times and we plan to unleash the best reporters in the country on the most important story: how the new Congress and president govern in this historic period," publisher Robert Allbritton said at the time.
Politico is not the only media organization with expansion plans for the new administration and not the only one with an eye on the Web.
The Washington Post plans to increase its number of White House reporters from two to four, including its first full-time blogger, while The Washington Times is expanding its number of White House correspondents from one to three.
National Public Radio, which reaches an audience of 26 million Americans, is focusing more on the Web and reshuffling its White House team to cover "the biggest story in national politics: the rise of a new regime in Washington."
The changes on the White House beat do not solely concern numbers.
When Obama is sworn in on January 20, an entirely new operation will take over the White House Press Office and speculation tinged with some trepidation has been raging in newsrooms around the country over how it will operate.
The Obama campaign was notoriously tight-lipped and disciplined during the election campaign and there are fears among some in what is known as the mainstream media, or MSM, that leaks and access -- their bread and butter -- may be limited in the new administration.
Another fear is that an Obama government may try to bypass the traditional White House press corps entirely, taking its message directly to the American people or favoring newcomer websites such as Politico or The Huffington Post.
"Just like Kennedy brought in the television presidency I think we're about to see the first wired, or connected, or Internet (presidency)," said Joe Trippi, the political consultant behind the pioneering Web strategy of 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean.
"It's about the president and the people actually connecting in a way that's never happened before," Trippi told a panel on "The Web and Politics" at the recent Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
In a possible sign of things to come, the president-elect made the first YouTube address to the nation on Saturday, recording the weekly talk not just on radio but also on video.
"This is just one of many ways that president-elect Obama will communicate directly with the American people and make the White House and the political process more transparent," Obama spokesman Nick Shapiro said.
Stephen Hess, who served in the administrations of presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon and advised presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, said the mainstream media need not be overly concerned.
"One of the habits of presidents is to adapt the technology at hand," Hess said, citing Franklin D. Roosevelt's use of radio for his "fireside chats" and the first televised press conferences by John F. Kennedy.
"Now it's the turn of the Internet," said Hess, a senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution and author of a new book called "What Do We Do Now?" which offers transition advice to a new president.
"Another habit of presidents is to try to find ways to bypass the mainstream media or at least the media that confront them, and that is the White House press corps," Hess added.
"But it's never been truly possible to go over the heads of the White House press corps because they're the ones who are sitting there day after day," he said. "All of these things have a history, almost as if there's nothing new under the sun."
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