YouTube gives anchor greater exposure

September 9, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

The anchorman wears “Bite Me” T-shirts instead of a suit and tie, has traded the traditional anchor’s desk for a red couch decorated with “Angry Birds” stuffed animals, and delivers hyper-caffeinated headlines like a wacky Walter Winchell for the Web.

He’s YouTube’s Philip DeFranco. His humorous, opinionated 10-minute news roundup attracts as many as 3 million views per episode — at its best, surpassing the average viewership of such recognizable programs as CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” HLN’s “Nancy Grace,” MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” and even Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.”

DeFranco’s work got greater exposure during the Republican National Convention, as part of YouTube’s new Elections Hub. He has joined ABC News, Al Jazeera English, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Univision in providing convention news and analysis and ongoing coverage of the campaign through the Nov. 6 election.

YouTube’s political effort reflects the growing importance of the Internet as a source of campaign news for people younger than 30. The campaigns of President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have uploaded more than 600 videos to their respective YouTube channels since April 2011, and those campaign videos, and others mentioning the two presidential candidates, have attracted almost 2 billion views on YouTube, said Olivia Ma, YouTube’s news and politics manager.

“We’ve seen there is a huge demand for political news on YouTube,” Ma said.

Google Inc.’s YouTube is not alone in recognizing the shifting media landscape. Microsoft Corp. said it would provide live coverage of the presidential debates through its Xbox Live, which is available to the 40 million people who access the Internet service through their game consoles.

Most Americans still get their campaign news from cable news outlets, according to a report released this year by Pew Research Center. Still, the number of people going online to keep abreast of political news has nearly tripled since 2000 — even though the growth has leveled off in the current election year because of a lack of interest among the younger users who are the most avid consumers of Internet news, Pew found.

DeFranco, who works under a stage name for safety reasons, connects with a young, predominantly male audience.

Two-thirds of “The Philip DeFranco Show’s” 2.1 million subscribers are boys and men ages 13 to 34 who are enticed to the four-day-a-week segments by what DeFranco describes as “shallow news” (think Kardashians or Prince Harry cavorting in Las Vegas in the buff). But he also tackles weightier matters, such as Ecuador’s granting asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

On a recent morning, the 26-year-old DeFranco decamped to his studio to record a segment about nine Russian activists suing pop star Madonna for supporting gay rights during a concert in St. Petersburg, where promoting homosexuality to young people is banned. He stands in his studio facing a camera mounted on a tripod supported by a trio of paint cans. To his left, propped on a metal step-stool, are his MacBook laptop and a giant iced coffee.

Working without a script or a teleprompter, DeFranco reads online news accounts on his laptop before riffing maniacally about the Madonna lawsuit — starting and stopping eight times before nailing his opening line.

“Russia, I love you. You give us flexible gymnasts, mail-order brides and those little dolls that have little dolls inside of them,” he says. “But today you’re making me do something I hate and that is defend Madonna.”

It takes roughly 25 minutes for DeFranco to complete the fleeting segment, which will be edited into the jump-cut, staccato style familiar to his viewers.

Recently, DeFranco and his team were furiously preparing to cover one of the biggest news events of the year — as first-time, credentialed journalists.

“We’ve been pre-taping like crazy,” DeFranco said of the coverage plan for the conventions. “Because, in a way, we are representing YouTube, and it’s something that I take very seriously.”