Washington:
On Monday, President Barack Obama sat down in the White House library for his first interview since his State of the Union address. The interviewer? The United States of YouTube.
In a first-of-its-kind group interview, President Barack Obama answered questions by YouTube users in a live webcast.
"It's a more participatory way of giving people access to the President," said Macon Phillips, the Obama administration's director of new media.
YouTube, owned by Google, allowed people to both submit questions and vote for their favorite ones, "to get a stronger signal about what the crowd is interested in," said Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube.
The webcast was an example of the White House trying to bypass traditional media, at a time when Obama is looking to regain popular support after the loss of a Senate seat in Massachusetts that cost Democrats their supermajority.
Sessions like Monday's webcast "are the 21st-century equivalent of Roosevelt's fireside chats," said Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference and blog about politics and technology. Kevin Sullivan, a White House communications director in the Bush administration, said answering questions from citizens is a "smart supplement" to traditional interviews, but added, "It doesn't replace taking questions from professional journalists."
The president has not held a formal news conference at the White House for six months.