Q: Steve Grove is the director of news and political programming at YouTube. Steve, you guys changed the whole world, but let's begin with Election Day and what you're going to do.

Grove: Well, on Election Day we're actually partnering with PBS to get voters to go out and document their voting experience. You know, this has been the most documented election in U.S. history, and on Election Day people are going to no doubt be wanting to document their voting experience, and really our goal is to make this the most transparent process we've ever had. You know, there are going to be a lot of first-time voters out there who can go out and document the excitement of their Election Day experience, but of course there's also going to be problems -- you know, there's election fraud, long lines, broken machines -- these things are an unfortunate reality of our electoral process here in the U.S., and who better to document it in a YouTube age than the voters themselves through video cameras?

Q: But they can't take video cameras into the polls, right?

Grove: You know, you'd be surprised. In many states you can.

Q: Wow.

Grove: The laws are quite different in different places, and you can find all the different laws at our YouTube channel, YouTube.com/videoyourvote. But in most states, you actually can bring a camera, and whether you can bring it inside or outside, you can certainly document what takes place there, and we expect people to do that on Election Day.

Q: So is PBS going to show these?

Grove: They are. They're going to show the most interesting content on their broadcast throughout the day, particularly stuff that is problematic. People who do see problems at the polls are going to tag their videos "Poll Problems" so you can search YouTube to see, you know, where problems are surfacing. And then we have a Google Maps mash-up on the Video Your Vote channel at YouTube.com so you can filter by different types of polling problems or whether people saw a celebrity vote or whether they were first-time voters. So it'll be a lot of fun; it'll be just sort of getting a voter's-eve view of what takes place on the 4th.

Q: I love that Google Map Earth, though, but it's weird to see your own house up on the Web.

Grove: It is. You better hope that you had a fresh coat of paint the day that the Google Picture truck drove by.

Q: And they drive by, right?

Grove: Yeah, exactly.

Q: Well, let's go back to the beginning of this election, if we can. Because I think what changed everything was that CNN/YouTube debate, where people realized that they could not just talk directly to the candidates, but that their video can change the conversation.

Grove: You know, it's interesting you say that. I think the most divisive issue between both [Hillary] Clinton and [Barack] Obama, then Obama and [John] McCain really sparked at the YouTube debate in Charleston, South Carolina back on the 23rd of July of '07 when a user asked Obama if he would speak directly with foreign dictators. Obama of course said yes, and Hillary Clinton said that she wouldn't because she didn't want to be used for propaganda purposes. And that really became the defining difference between those two candidates in the primary, and it started in the YouTube debate with a gentleman who just uploaded a question to the YouTube channel and it was posed to the candidates.

Q: I want to talk to you about post-election and how you're going to handle it, because I think you guys have engaged all these voters, and I'm curious, you know, what you think they're going to do. I mean, you're a former television reporter; you know how all of this goes. Once people are engaged they expect more. But please tell us more about that moment, because you're right -- it defined the conversation all the way through.

Grove: Yeah, you know, it really did. And I think -- the debates I think in some way were symbolic of the rise of the Internet in this election. Seven of the 16 presidential candidates actually announced their campaigns on YouTube, through YouTube videos, showing that, hey, you know what, we can just go straight to the voters with our media and connect with them there.

The Obama campaign, I think, has been particularly effective on YouTube. They for about the past eight or nine months uploaded about two or three videos to their YouTube channel a day. In the past three days they've uploaded almost 60 videos. So they're really running their own internal television station of the Obama campaign, but they're doing so in a way that recognizes the power of video to be a conversation, not just a different distribution pipe for your content.

And so it's these debates and questions and answers and sessions like that I think that really realize the power of video to get more people involved and to actually empower a new class of people, a new group of people to take political action. The barrier to entry, I think, now to make a political statement is so much lower because of the Internet. Uploading a video to YouTube isn't that hard, nor is commenting on one or ranking one, and so you see this whole new group of people getting involved in politics online, and I think that's exciting for a lot of different people.

Q: I wonder if you joined the online Greek chorus, as I call them, of people who have said that part of the reason that Hillary Clinton lost is, while she did announce on YouTube, as I recall, and that of course she had that famous "Sopranos" video, it was all in the old-style producing, of, very, very slickly produced and less Web-y or YouTube-y. Do you agree?

Grove: Yeah, I think there were probably some gaps in Hillary Clinton's YouTube strategy, as it were. I'd probably be less hard on her than most, just because really this is a brand new platform with very little of a roadmap to go by. And so I think candidates probably considered at the beginning that this was just another way to distribute your message and not actually a different type of tool. And so I think that was challenging for the Clinton campaign.

I think, you know, candidates can use YouTube as best they can, but it's really the way that voters use it that's the most exciting. And what candidates like Barack Obama and Ron Paul and even Ralph Nader and some of the French candidates have proven in this campaign is that it's what voters create for them on YouTube that is the most compelling. You know, the most viewed video about Barack Obama on YouTube in this election is, of course, Will.I.Am's "Yes We Can" mash-up. And fewer people probably know this, but on the right the most-viewed video about McCain is a 10 million-viewed video by an Iraqi veteran saying that we need McCain in the White House. So it's that content that has sort of an extra layer of authenticity, because it comes from outside the campaign, that really, I think, is the hallmark of a great YouTube video.

Q: The other thing that you guys have which I just found out about recently is the hot trend section. If you can talk about that, because that's really going to be able to tell us in these final days of this election what people are interested in.

Grove: This is just fascinating to me. I mean, every day you can actually go on Google and find out what they most searched terms are on the search bar, and it really is interesting. I actually sort of follow pop culture by seeing what people are searching for on Google. And on Election Day and around political events, you know, always those search terms are politically-related. So on Election Day we're going to be running three different hot trends reports, one at noon, one at 6 pm and one at midnight that shows what the top-searched terms were politically on Election Day. And so you'll be able to see what people were interested in and what they're going to find out online.

And I think what's interesting there is just that hundreds of thousands of Americans are now going online to search for political information. This really is a sea change in terms of how people will get their information, almost analogous to what TV did in the mid-1960s. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Tammy, 46 percent of Americans have used the Internet or e-mail or mobile phones to participate in politics. I mean, that's almost half the country, and that's not even accounting for Internet access writ large. So it really is becoming, I think -- Google and YouTube and other online platforms -- are becoming really how people get their political information today.

Q: Well, you're sort of hurting my friends on the TV side -- and your friends too -- because when it's so completely easily available whenever you want it online, you know, why would you go anywhere else? I mean, people post television clips, the greatest news sound bytes. When something happened in this election, people didn't go to ABC, NBC or CBS, they went to YouTube to look it up.

Grove: Well, I think that's right. I think there's an interesting phenomenon, and you described it perfectly, and it's that people come to YouTube as like the second source. So you hear something happens and boom, you go to YouTube to find the video clip of it. And that does present a challenge for media organizations. You know, we work with a lot of companies who are actually trying to figure out how to use YouTube themselves, so you know, you might not know it but the Associated Press and the New York Times and Reuters and the Wall Street Journal all have their own YouTube channels. And they're also in the fray there trying to get views.

And it is challenging. I mean, every minute 13 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube; every day hundreds of millions of videos are viewed. So we could sit here trying to figure out how mainstream media can reach more eyeballs on the site -- and it's something we take very seriously, not just because these people are our partners but because we want journalism to continue to thrive and to be strong and it is important to have professionals to help interpret information and do the kind of vetting that media has always done -- but undoubtedly with more access to information the piece of the pie gets smaller and smaller as people have different places to go.

Q: Steve Grove, you've changed the world this year with YouTube. Thanks for being with us.

Grove: Thanks for having me, Tammy.

Copyright ©2009 by National Journal Group Inc. The Watergate 600 New Hampshire Ave., NW Washington, DC 20037
202-739-8400 • fax 202-833-8069 NationalJournal.com is an Atlantic Media publication.