OK … perhaps the prize isn’t as whopping as America’s Got Talent’s or American Idol’s. But a Ron Paul supporter is insisting that he’s launching a Ron Paul video contest on YouTube with the top prize $4,000.
Yes, friends, this is indeed the Age Of You Tube. First, you had weblogs where any citizen could be his/her/it’s own editor, publisher at a shockingly low cost. The result: between Internet websites, Internet advertising and young people reading more weblogs than old fogey-ish newspapers (which often have “blogs” that are to real “blogs” what William Shatner singing The Beatles was to The Beatles) the newspaper industry is in cutback mode.
And now news media democratization spreads even further to political campaigns. Not only can blogs (in many cases) be mouthpieces and gathering places for partisans, but now YouTube visitors can actually help CREATE an ad for Ron Paul — and win money for their creativity. How much influence an an Internet ad have? Maybe not a ton but it’s training a whole new generation of Americans who could have greater influence as the new media grows and expands in influence and audience share.
Of course, there are spoofs about Ron Paul. But Paul and his supporters are dead serious: he’s even doing a major Internet fund-raising drive. According to The Hill, supporters are responding in kind now…via Paypal.
But can Paul overcome the “conventional wisdom” which quickly type-casts candidates (and, if they win at the polls, throws out the old conventional wisdom and acts as if it was never there before — in a way similar to the Bush administration’s musical-chairs-like justifications for the Iraq war)?
No matter….now The YouTube Age is upon partisans who can actually create a campaign ad (which they know is not totally news) and get prizes for it. Here’s the YouTube announcing the contest:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsSiv1neBzw
NOTE: YouTube is doing maintenance and the video has vanished. We will restore it when YouTube comes back up.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.