The average person, if asked to visualize George Stephanopoulos interviewing John McCain, would probably imagine both men in a television studio, wearing suits. But this Tuesday, it seems that McCain and Stephanopoulos will instead be hunched over keyboards and possibly dressed in their jammies.
Stephanopoulos and McCain have announced that they’ll be holding a “Twitterview.” Anyone who’s interested can send discussion ideas to the television reporter’s Twitter account, and then, starting at noon on the 17th, Stephanopoulos will pose questions to McCain 140 characters at a time. McCain should answer in the same fashion (although he may be able to tweet more than once per exchange).
Everybody’s excited about the idea. On George’s Bottom Line, Stephanopoulos explained that this is “[a]ll a part of exploring new ways to connect with our ‘This Week’ viewers online.” He also noted, “This week I ‘tweeted’ with Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., about her vote against the omnibus legislation on Twitter. And I’ve been enjoying replying to viewers’ questions online.”
As for McCain, the message he made public prior to mentioning the Twitterview reads, “Tweet Announcement: Met with the Vietnamese Ambassador to discuss upcoming trip to Vietnam – posted here first!” So he obviously likes the service, too.
This is great press for Twitter. Evan Williams, its CEO, just has to be praying that no outages occur and the character limit doesn’t become a burden.
