Obama to deliver weekly address via YouTube
President-elect Barack Obama will be delivering his weekly presidential address via YouTube as well as radio, his campaign says.
For the first time ever, the president's weekly address to the nation will be delivered via video as well as radio.
President-elect Barack Obama, the Washington Post reported, will begin by taping this week's Democratic address at his transition office in Chicago on Friday, and the video will be posted on Saturday to Obama's transition site, Change.gov, via YouTube. Other members of the Obama administration will post online videos as well.
On Thursday evening, Obama's transition team co-chair Valerie Jarrett posted a YouTube video, shown below, to the site explaining the lobbying restrictions for Obama's transition team.
The tradition of the president addressing the public directly via radio dates back to President Franklin Roosevelt's "fireside chats" in the 1930s. Archived audio recordings of all of President George Bush's weekly radio addresses can be found at the White House Web site.
Delivering the radio addresses via online video is a logical step for the first president elected in the era of YouTube. The Obama campaign uploaded more than 1,800 videos to its YouTube page.