White House Correspondents Insider
Behind the scenes of the most powerful city in the world — Washington, D.C. — and those who cover it.
Why bother with emails when you can leave a video on your friend’s wall in the same amount of time?
Ok, so that’s not exactly the normal Facebook etiquette, but it could soon be due to the staggering amount of video being uploaded to the social networking site.
C-SPAN taking its digital roots further into the District with Foursquare may not sound important, but it’s fantastic news for trivia nerds.
The cable channel’s reason for joining the geo-tagging service is simple enough: be ‘friends’ with C-SPAN. Check in at a certain D.C. venue and get a bit of history. If you check into the Washington Hilton, you’ll get a prompt to watch the 2010 White House Correspondents Dinner speech from President Obama. The plan, according to Fishbowl DC, is to further expand C-SPAN’s Digital Bus to tag political locations across its U.S. Tour.
Of course, it’d be just as nifty to learn some history depending on where you’re near–such as getting a nudge to go past the old Yenching Palace address in Cleveland Park that closed three years ago and helped end the Cuban Missile Crisis. Or if you happen to be at Good Guys, find out about the Russian spy who escaped through a bathroom window and ran up Wisconsin toward the Russian Embassy.
So friend C-Span and hope they start adding more of the fun side from the Beltway gang.
So long Daisy and Demon Sheep; hello mobile phones and faux-reports!
The Washington Post reports on Robert Ehrlich Jr.’s recent advertising campaign to take back the governor’s seat this year. Instead of a generic spot airing on the cable networks, the former Maryland governor provides on-location briefings via YouTube “covered” by Andy Barth, a former TV reporter and now acting as his press secretary.
Obama’s premiere Oval Office speech last week was the worst of social media and the best of social media.
Mashable ran “Obama Speech on BP Oil Not A Hit with Facebook and Twitter Users” after taking data provided by Crimson Hexagon from “83,000 Tweets and public Facebook comments” over a nine hour shift. But taking such things into account can provide little feedback, especially when 15 percent of the poll were annoyed they missed So You Think You Can Dance and the other five questioned why so many people would anonymously make fun of the president.
The D.C. political machine has a reputation for being a boys club rather than a gentleman’s establishment; but it takes a woman’s touch to actually discuss it.
Well, women to be more accurate.
Both Sides Now, which had a soft release as a podcast, will have its formal launch this Monday in New York according to The Daily Politics. The weekly radio show comes from The Huffington Post’s Editor-in-Chief Ariana Huffington and power pundit Mary Matalin and is hosted/created by Mark Green according to FishbowlDC.
We’re a fan of the tagline (“We Debate…You Decide”) and the Facebook page too. So what’s the premise? Huffington, Matalin and Green taking on the topics in Washington without having to wake up before 10 a.m. on a Sunday?
Sold.
Jake Tapper and Julie Mason talk about the daily WH press briefing from whcinsider on Vimeo.
In part 3 of our interview with The Examiner’s Julie Mason and ABC News’ Jake Tapper – a former print reporter for Salon.com – tell WHCInsider that televising the White House briefing may be bad for journalism.
“An argument can be made while televising the briefing, while wonderful in the interest of transparency, actually hurts the interest of journalism being committed,” said Tapper. “It becomes a show,” added Mason. “And often time’s reporters are judged on the questions they ask during the briefing, when it’s such a tiny part of what we do. It sort of becomes counterproductive.”
Most of the White House correspondents’ work is done outside the regular press briefings … and both Tapper and Mason joked that they had “occasionally fettered access” outside the scheduled briefings.
Go behind the scenes at the White House briefing room here.
Former Bush White House press secretary Dana Perino and her former deputy Tony Fratto, along with ex-Bush press adviser Ed Gillespie, will advise House Republican press secretaries during their annual workshop at the end of this week, Politico reports. Specifically, they will advise on reshaping the GOP’s overall message.
Think it will help? Let us know in a comment.
NBC WH Correspondent Chuck Todd
Elections usher in more than a new White House resident. It’s a time when the networks tap their new White House correspondent. For NBC, the highly regarded political analyst and editor Chuck Todd now occupies the NBC seat in the White House Briefing Room. While less than a mile away from his old perch at the Watergate as editor in chief of the Hotline, a back room backbencher of much political importance. WHCInsider talked with Todd about his much more public role. (He received an expensive old-fashioned shaving kit from a viewer when he won the NBC White House chair). Todd won’t comment on rumors he will be getting his own interview show on MSNBC, but he proudly shares anecdotes of 5-year-old Margaret and 2-year-old Harrison.
Chuck Todd
Q. What surprised you most about being a White House Correspondent?
A. The lack of physical access inside the White House. The high irony is we connect the two buildings, the White House to the West Wing. The folks in the white house get to decide where you sit, where you go. It is not new to this White House, it’s a every modern White House that’s controlling.
Q. Compare Obama campaign access vs. The White House?
A. The White House is more open and transparent than the campaign but only because you cannot run the White House in a tight circle of just five people.
Q. How about your transition into this reporter role?
A. I had a lot of real frustration. I don’t think Ana Maria Cox got it right about getting rid of the White House Correspondents. We still have a real value, but you have a lot of the good reporting outside the White House. It is easier to report from outside the White House. [Read more…]
Cultivating Relations with Celebrity Press/Paparazzi
This White House photo was released as part of a strategy to discourage unauthorized photos, the L.A. Times reports.
Don’t think those pictures you see of the Obamas as an ordinary family leading an ordinary life just happen naturally, reports the Los Angeles Times. “The White House, eager to cultivate an image-making media machinery that thrives on personality, has invited coverage from such outlets as television’s ‘Access Hollywood’ and ‘Extra.’ Aides dole out exclusives accordingly, acutely aware of the shelf life for cover stories in glamour and celebrity magazines,” the paper says.
“Administration officials have even weighed the economics of paparazzi photography, strategically releasing images of the family to diminish the monetary value of unauthorized pictures and give the White House control over how the family is portrayed. In return for access, celebrity news outlets must refuse to publish unauthorized pictures — or risk being cut off by the White House.” Full story here.
You must be logged in to post a comment.