What does a Twitter interview of a White House administration official look like on video?
Like this. NPR’s Andy Carvin and Foreign Policy’s Marc Lynch interviewed Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes on Thursday while taking questions from Twitter. “It felt like we were juggling and riding a unicycle simultaneously, all the while trying to interview a senior administration official,” Carvin explains of the interview.
The interview streamed live on WhiteHouse.gov and Facebook following President Obama’s speech about the Middle East. “It struck me as strange it was going to be streamed at all; I mean, what could be more dull than two Twitter geeks with their heads buried in their laptops as the interview subject patiently waits for us to type?” Carvin says. “I was worried the cameras would be a distraction. Fortunately they were far away from us, so as soon as we started it was easy to ignore them. We even decided not to wear our suit coats for the interview. Twitter was the whole reason we were doing this, not video, so who cared if we weren’t as dapper as our interview subject was?”
Carvin and Lynch used the hashtag #MEspeech to curate questions for the interview, but by happenstance, it became the default hashtag for the president’s speech, hitting the top trending topic as the interview was getting underway. “Each time I tried to grab a potential question, it and a hundred other tweets would fly past me,” Carvin says. “Somehow, Marc managed to grab a few while we were doing the interview, catching the proverbial fly with lightning-fast chopsticks.”
One of the fastest people on Twitter I’ve ever seen, Carvin kept up through the interview, tweeting Rhodes’ answers in short, quick chunks. (NPR has embedded the full list at the bottom of this story.) “To our surprise, we managed to hit upon every topic we had planned on including,” Carvin says.
For many of Carvin’s global Twitter followers — many live in the Middle East and North Africa — watching and participating in an interview that evolved before their eyes on Twitter must have been a slightly surreal experience. That’s why this Twitter interview didn’t seem “forced” in my mind, but a progression of Carvin’s amazing curation of the region. Sure, a 3-minute, edited TV piece of the interview may be easier on the eyes than watching tweets fly by, but given Carvin’s audience and the crowdsourced questions, it was a natural fit.