As predicted, President-elect Obama will use YouTube in addition to radio to deliver his weekly address to the nation. This will be the first time that a President-elect will use online video to deliver his weekly message.
"President-elect Obama will continue to record and make available the
Democratic radio addresses on video when he is in the White House," according a Friday statement issued by Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden's transition project. "No President-elect or President has ever turned the radio address into a multi-media opportunity before."
The weekly radio address is a traditionthat enables the president to tell the American people in his own words what he's been up to, discuss what challenges, issues and projects are ahead of him, and how he intends to tackle them.
Last week, Obama delivered the weekly Democratic Radio Address, which is available onlinelike the rest of the party's weekly radio addresses as an MP3 file. Obama discussed the results of the election, his upcoming meeting with President Bush and the First Lady, and what his transition team is doing to prepare for its work once in office about the dire state of the economy.
The YouTube address will be embedded at Change.gov Saturday morning.
As Obama explained himself during an interviewwith YouTube's News and Politics Editor Steve Grove last November, you can expect many more kinds of modernizations in the way that the White House connects to the public in the near future. At the time, Obama said that he wanted to conduct "21st century fireside chats" via streaming video, where he could take questions online.
The Obama-Biden transition project is billing this update in the way the President-elect communicates as an enhancement to government transparency (rather than an enhanced exercise in public relations.)
Expect many more such "enhancements" in the weeks and months to come as Obama makes use of the tools he did during the 2008 campaign, such as Twitterand text-messaging to build a direct relationship with the people of America, and the rest of the world.
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