There’s a New, Hot Startup in Town: the White House

And I think that — and this one is tricky — a White House will have to have many more resources dedicated to producing content. We have a lot of people around here who write written words — speeches, talking points, press releases — and you will need people who are creating visual, graphical and video images to communicate the same message. It’s tricky because you don’t want to be in a world where it is propaganda. You’re going to have to vet this and give it scrutiny, but there is an insatiable appetite for content out there. Your traditional news outlets don’t have the resources to produce the amount of content that the Internet requires on a 24/7 basis.

Here is an interview with Obama’s Communications Czar (for real) Dan Pfeiffer, which explores the White House’s relationship with all the cool-hip-young-people sites that Obama has been frequenting lately. But why not remove the middle man? Maybe Pfeiffer is on to something here — hire a bunch of the best and the brightest at Buzzfeed and Vox, give them the resources of the White House (and maybe some Windex?), and let them run wild and create their own content. There’s already a massive audience — -the American people, those wily, internet-addicted bastards — -so why not just keep total control?

Totally unrelated: we *do* occasionally take guest editors, and funnily enough the only requirement is that you have to have presided over a mid-to-large sized country for more than 4+ years, have Michelle Obama’s phone number (I want to know where she gets her hair done) and know your way around a selfie stick. To inquire about the position, please email me.