politics

Lawrence Summers, former cabinet secretary under Bill Clinton and a past president of Harvard, has been tapped to be head of the National Economic Counsel, the top economics spot in White House, the Wall Street Journal reported tonight. Summers is an investor in BigThink, a New York-based video site for featuring short, well-edited comments by […]

We are fascinated that President-elect Barack Obama is addressing the nation on Saturdays both on radio and on video via YouTube.  Today he outlined an economic stimulus plan. Last week’s address garnered nearly 1 million views, as CNET’s Dan Farber points out in his post.  Today’s YouTube address has just 65,000 views as of 2 […]

Long one of the biggest shows on television, 60 Minutes will drive considerable traffic to CBSNews.com on Sunday evening with its exclusive post-election interview with Barack and Michelle Obama. Correspondent Steve Croft interviewed the Obamas earlier today in Chicago.  It will air on Sunday at 7:00 p.m. Beet.TV has learned that immediately following the broadcast […]

Msnbc.com is claiming an election coverage victory “by a landslide” over arch online rival CNN.com.  According to internal numbers, the Microsoft/NBC Universal joint venture had an astounding 53 million unique visitors to the site during the week ending November 8.  This would be about 400 percent above normal traffic. Citing Nielsen Online numbers, visitors to […]

The Washington Post, long a pioneer in the online media space, registered the biggest percentage jump of all major news sites on election day, Nielsen Online reported last night.  Although far from the newly crowned traffic leader, CNN.com with a record 12.8 million unique visitors, the Post jumped 113 percent to 2.3 million uniques. (Nielsen […]

Chris Hughes, 24, one of the three co-founders of Facebook, left the start-up in early 2007 in sunny Palo Alto for Chicago to join the nacent Obama campaign. Hughes went on to mastermind the digital strategy for the long-shot candidate and the MyBarackObama.com social networking site. Sarah Lai Stirland has a story in Wired this […]

CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien spoke with me about reporting from the exit polls in an interview this afternoon. She discussed the process for analyzing the polls and gave her perspective on covering the technology space for nearly 12 years, as she was previously an anchor for ZDTV, the first technology news network. […]

CBS has live video coverage of the election available through Verizon Wireless V CAST and on-demand video for the iPhone, Ethan Dreilinger, Director of CBS Mobile News, told Andy in an interview this afternoon. “It’s a much richer experience, and it’s more of the experience that you are expecting,” he says. “So if you’re expecting […]

NBC News and MSNBC have taken over the skating rink at Rockefeller center for a public viewing of election results. Earlier today I interviewed Robert Dembo, Executive Director of NBC News about the event. If you can’t make it there, you’ll see it as part of the coverage on both NBC and MSNBC news.

CNN.com and CNN International had received 88 million page views by 3 p.m. this afternoon, three to four times more than on an average weekday, Executive Vice President of CNN News Services Susan Grant told Beet.TV. CNN.com Live, which has four simultaneous live streams, had generated 1.6 million views domestically and internationally–seven times higher than […]

There are currently over 1.5 million active media streams online, 83 percent more than the daily average, according to data on the Akamai website, indicating higher video consumption likely prompted by the U.S. election. The number of visitors per minute to news websites has also risen, to around 3.4 million in the U.S., 14 percent […]

CNN has stepped up advertising of its live coverage this year, and is promoting CNN.com Live’s election night coverage on The New York Times homepage today as part of that effort.

msnbc.com has plans for interactive coverage of voting results on a hyperlocal level, Charlie Tillinghast, president and publisher told Kelsey earlier today in this interview. Visitors to the site’s national map will be able to see results for both states and individual counties on election night.  Not just the data for political insiders, understanding how […]

Barack Obama has been more challenging to characterize from a comedic standpoint than McCain, according to JibJab CEO Gregg Spiridellis. Spiridellis spoke on a panel at the TimeWarner Politics 08 Summit last week about politics and comedy on the web. JibJab had the first online video political comedy hit way back in 2004 with “This […]

The impact of online video on the 2008 presidential campaign will be sorted out by political scientists, historians, media pundits and consultants over the months and years ahead, but political strategist and former Edwards campaign senior advisor Joe Trippi tells Beet.TV that the Obama-financed “1984” video effectively crippled Hillary Clinton’s hopes. The mash-up of an […]

Good video journalism can come in different forms, from capturing an instantaneous moment in a war or distilling a difficult concept, according to John Roberts, anchor of CNN’s American Morning. The veteran journalist was formerly with CBS News.

MySpace has launched several major initiatives this election season to get younger voters involved in the political process. It formed MyDebates.org in partnership with the Commission on Presidential Debates, conducted a poll with NBC News and the Wall Street Journal Online geared toward younger voters, and is working with major voter registration groups like Rock […]

Eat the Press editor Rachel Sklar will be leaving The Huffington Post after the election to work on her book, according to a report on Gawker today. Andy interviewed Sklar at the TimeWarner Politics 08 summit earlier this week about online video at The Huffington Post and expansions underway at the site.

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer told Andy at the TimeWarner Politics 08 Summit that he keeps his opinions out of The Situation Room. “I’m sort of an old-school, serious, hard news reporter who likes to do the news in a responsible way and not necessarily showcase my opinion, but to try to get some information out […]

TheWashingtonPost.com broke its own traffic record in September, receiving nearly 12 million unique visitors and surpassing USAToday.com to become the second largest newspaper site on the web, according to numbers released by Nielsen today. The New York Times holds the number one spot.