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Here are a few scenes from a revolution: In early February, Barack Obama ended a six-month press-conference drought by taking questions from YouTube. When a madman crashed his plane into a Texas office building a couple of weeks later, the White House responded on its blog. And during the bipartisan summit on health reform, press secretary Robert Gibbs used Twitter to keep score.
The news cycle that once defined the day at the White House has given way to a more ferocious beast. Call it the news cyclone, a massive force without beginning or end that churns constantly and seems almost impervious to management. In response, Obama's advisers have had to remake the rules of presidential p.r. "We have a theory of how the news media work in this Internet age," explains Dan Pfeiffer, the buzz-cut 34-year-old who recently became the third person to serve as Obama's communications director. "There is basically a constant swirl going on."
This twister still includes the newspaper front pages, nightly news broadcasts and magazine covers that can often shape the national debate. But it also incorporates Sarah Palin's Facebook page, the latest Internet attack videos and that e-mail your aunt just sent you. "There is a constant conversation that goes on all day long, through blogs, through cable TV, through Twitter, between reporter, subject and reader," says Pfeiffer, who sits down the hall from the Oval Office. He says his new job is to "make sure we are not getting swallowed up by the swirl."
During the 2008 campaign, Obama's team was able to exploit new technologies as no political campaign had before. It created its own media empire -- an e-mail list with 13 million subscribers, a YouTube channel with millions of views and a massive social-networking operation. "What the voters heard, we determined," boasted Anita Dunn, a top campaign aide, "as opposed to some editor in a TV station."
But the White House has proved to be a harder perch from which to dominate the conversation. Last summer, a single phrase -- "death panels" -- nearly derailed health care reform, as town halls were flooded with angry voters who got their information online. That there was no proposal for anything that resembled a death panel did not matter; the idea went viral anyway. "The process for covering the President hasn't changed as much as the medium of the media has," explains Gibbs, who recently joined Twitter and promptly earned 34,000 followers. "You have a complete segmentation of the media that you haven't had before."
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