To get the conversation started for today’s first Twitter Town Hall at the White House, Twitter executives turned to a handful of journalists from across the country to help generate questions about jobs and the economy for President Obama.
Dorrine Mendoza, 42, the online editor for The North County Times, a daily newspaper outside San Diego, was among the journalists invited by Twitter late last week to help find questions. “I am deeply honored to participate,” she said. “I believe Twitter can be the great equalizer. It allows anyone to ask the president a question.”
Ms. Mendoza said most of the questions she is getting from her Twitter followers reflect concerns from military families who live in the region and worries about the economy, expiring unemployment benefits and the California state budget, especially the impact of cuts on education.
Steven Norton, 21, editor of The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina, said he has been focused on trying to get questions from people
living in the South and from college students who are wondering about job prospects after graduation.
“The questions that I hope will reach the president will be a lot about job trends, what jobs will be available for seniors coming out of college and what initiatives are
being taken to provide job opportunities,” he said.
Mr. Obama is expected to answer questions from Twitter users for about an hour, beginning at 2 p.m. Eastern time. The conversation will be displayed in real time on two gigantic screens in the East Room. Questions will be chosen in advance and during the event by Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and executive chairman who recently returned to the company.
The event will be streamed live at //askobama.twitter.com and //wh.gov/live and regular updates will be posted on @townhall on Twitter.
In addition to the help from journalists, Twitter is also using its own curation tools and working with a partner, Mass Relevance, to help identify the most popular and relevant questions on the platform that use the hashtag #AskObama.
Twitter officials said they looked mostly to journalists as curators to help make sure questions reflected geographic diversity. The journalists include Kara McGuire, personal finance columnist for The Minneapolis Star Tribune; Kim Quillen, business editor of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans; and Drew Cline, editorial page editor for the New Hampshire Union Leader in Manchester.
Mr. Cline said that he was flooded with questions from Twitter users within a few hours after he made a few posts on his Twitter feed, saying he was asked to be a curator.
“It’s an interesting mix of people expressing their anxieties and fears about their own economic future, people grinding axes, and people trying to ask something that might be noticed amid the deluge,” said Mr. Cline who began using Twitter about two years ago.
The Twitter Town Hall is the latest effort to use social media platforms to help Mr. Obama hear from people outside of Washington, according to Macon Phillips, special assistant to the president and director of digital strategy.
Mr. Obama took questions from Marc Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer of Facebook, at the company’s headquarters in California earlier this year. The event was also streamed live and the questions and answers were displayed on Facebook.
In addition to the @whitehouse Twitter account with more than two million followers, there is a @barackobama account on Twitter with nearly nine million followers. That account is now being operated by members of Mr. Obama’s campaign team.
Campaign officials announced last month that Mr. Obama would post his own updates from time to time to the account, signing them – BO. So far, he is not tweeting regularly.