Access to Power: The YouTube Interviews with President Obama
When I started working at YouTube in 2007, the 2008 election cycle was just getting underway. We knew the platform was starting to have an influence on politics, with videos like the infamous “Macaca Moment”, Obama Girl’s “I got a crush on Obama”, or ParkRidge47’s Vote Different receiving national attention. Suddenly it seemed like anyone could have a voice through the Internet, and that voice could actually reach enough people to influence the political conversation.
Candidates and public officials began to notice the new phenomenon, which gave us a unique opportunity to try many things for the first time. We worked with all presidential candidates of both parties to start their own YouTube channels. We partnered with CNN to create the CNN/YouTube Debates — the first-ever tech/media debate partnership. And we worked with the YouTube community as user-generated political videos across the political spectrum became an important part of the conversation around the election. But perhaps the most significant initiative we developed was a “YouTube Interview” with President Obama, in which YouTube users got direct access to the White House in a series of interviews.
Today we’re releasing “Access to Power”, a look back at this unique series of interviews, its evolution during the Obama Presidency, and its role in expanding access to Presidential power:
The idea for a YouTube Interview seems pretty simple today: questions are sourced from YouTube users and voted up by the YouTube community. But at the time, the idea was new — and risky. A sitting president had never granted an interview to a social media platform before. And a format in which the White House would not see the questions ahead of time meant American citizens would effectively be conducting a crowd-sourced interview with the President of the United States.
That first YouTube Interview in 2009 took place just after the President’s State of the Union speech and was a pretty basic production. We wheeled a TV monitor into the White House Library and presented the video questions to President Obama in a Keynote deck, one after the other. The interview reached millions of people online — many of whom had not seen the President’s SOTU speech on TV earlier that week. And the interview got a lot of coverage in the media, amplifying its reach.
The interview made a big enough impact that the White House agreed to do it the next year, and the next, and the next… until they had established a tradition for the President to go straight to the American people after his State of the Union speech to answer questions on YouTube every year.
As technology progressed, we’ve experimented with new formats. We tried Google Hangouts as a way to create live back-and-forth conversations between the President and people who logged in from the comfort of their homes. We tried incorporating text questions in addition to video so that people without video cameras would have an opportunity to participate. And in the last few years, we’ve worked with a diverse set of YouTube creators for a set of face-to-face interviews in the East Room of the White House, sourcing questions directly from each creator’s online community.
It was inspiring and refreshing to see Hank Green, Bethany Mota, GloZell, and others like them sit down with the President to ask questions that matter to them and their audiences — the kinds of questions that would never make it into a traditional press briefing.
Lifestyle creator Ingrid Nilsen asked the President why feminine care products were taxed as luxury goods in so many states, which highlighted a little-known issue on the national stage and ultimately helped lead to several states changing their tax codes. A blind woman in Michigan asked the president via Hangout about disability rights. Techies asked about patent rights; a conservative blogger asked about the use of drones. And, of course, there were the “fun” questions — like why we don’t stop minting the penny, or the proper way for a dog to wear pants.
All of this served to bring new issues to the conversation, and draw audiences that may not typically pay attention to Presidential politics to engage with the issues. Perhaps most importantly, we hoped these interviews would humanize the relationship the American public has with its President online, moving past the soundbites of rapid-fire online communication to something more basic and important — a real conversation, accessible by anyone with a connection to the web.
As President Obama prepares to leave office, “Access to Power” takes a look back at this unique moment in expanding access to Presidential power. We hope this series will encourage others to leverage the power of the Internet to connect with the concerns of their constituents in new and substantive ways.
Steve Grove is the Director of the Google News Lab
