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May

19

How BlogHer got the interview with Barack Obama


You can watch the interview here and read the behind the scenes story here (written for Poynter Institute’s E-Media Tidbits by Professor Kim Pearson, a BlogHer contributing editor and member of their political team).

An excerpt from Kim’s article:

The process of generating the questions and conducting the interview reflect one vision of an emerging civic media — a term coined by folks at MIT for what has been variously called citizen journalism, public journalism, representative journalism, or participatory journalism. Propelled by thinkers such as Jay Rosen, Jan Schaffer, Leonard Witt and many others, the goal of civic media is to empower citizens with tools for democratic participation.

Kim then identifies four elements that she believes distinguish BlogHer’s approach and contribute to its success: how they developed questions, how they used professional journalists in conjunction with community members’ questions, the insistence that BlogHer speak directly to candidates and fitting the effort into an larger voter education strategy.

I hope we see more and more of this kind of interaction between our candidates and elected officials, especially given how closed the Bush administration has been.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 7:24 pm May 19th, 2008 in Barack Obama, Blogging, Media, Women 

Comments

4 Responses to “How BlogHer got the interview with Barack Obama”

  1. 1 Eric on May 20th, 2008 2:13 pm

    I found it interesting that of the 7 questions asked only 1 dealt directly with women’s issues (access to birth control). 3 on Iraq and 1 each on health care (general), poverty (general), and the environment (general).

  2. 2 Eric on May 20th, 2008 2:18 pm

    I should say “of the 7 questions I caught”. LOL. Guess there were 12. Add a general transportation question. Seems like Blogher getting an interview would be the time to really push important women’s issues instead of do a very generic Q&A.

  3. 3 Jill Miller Zimon on May 20th, 2008 2:18 pm

    Ah! she said with a big grin! That’s because ALL those issues are important to women. That is part of the whole effort of many women, especially those who seek office. Why wouldn’t all those issues be important to us? :) And frankly, issues like access to birth control damn well should be a man’s concern if ya catch my drift. There really is no such thing as just men’s or just women’s issues like the media tries to get us to label them.

  4. 4 Jill Miller Zimon on May 20th, 2008 2:21 pm

    You are so cute, Eric. It would seem that way if you aren’t familiar with Blogher but BlogHer is an enormous and extremely diverse community. Most of the participants that discuss politics there couldn’t tell you what a woman’s issue was – we view all issues as pretty much non-gender specific: we want everything addressed, period. Why wouldn’t we?

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