Message from a european blog to the White House: Only Six Degrees of Separation?

We want to interview Barack Obama.

Radiocable.com is a small and unknown blog media and so we had to use surrealistic ways to reach certain leaders and celebrities.

With Felipe Gonzalez (ex-Prime Minister or president of Spain) I booked, secretly, a table in a restaurant next to his table. I went there with all the family: my mother, my sisters… After dinner I jumped over him: «Mr. President, I apologize for the interruption, my name is blablabla, it´s impossible for us to get to you by other means blablabla».

Well, I have told the story before, although I never told Mr. Gonzalez that the meeting was not casual. The restaurant´s owner, a friend, had told me that Gonzalez had booked a table for a dinner with some former ministers and so I reserved, for that same evening, the closest table. It worked. That was the first great interview for Radiocable.com, and it was highlighted due to the politic silence of the former president.

We have a few of these stories. Another one was when we appealed to a carrier pigeon to take a message to Zapatero. A real one, yes. That pigeon produced a funny confusion in La Moncloa that I´ll explain some day. That´s why Pilar, my workmate in radiocable.com, and I are always joking about how we´ve specialized in searching for bugs or holes in the system.

Our last attempt was with Barack Obama, the President of the USA. And now that it looks like we´ve failed, we can tell about it.

Obama is nowadays the El Dorado of politic interviews. Perfect for an assured global impact.

We considered all kind of ideas to get to him: from renting a plane and writing a message in Washington’s sky -legally of course-, to publish an ad in the Washington Post. We even negotiated the price for that with a telecommunications company.

We conceived some other things, each one freakier than the one before because, how can you cross the world without moving? ..

Finally we decided to get him a note by hand. We asked everybody we thougt might help and we imagined all kind of possibilities. Ignacio, an executive at The Washington Post we are in contact with, offered himself to look after a politician who will deliver the note. And so we did. His name was George Voinovich, a former Ohio´s senator. He was about to quit his seat and he was invited to a presidential dinner. He offered himself to deliver the note to President Obama.

We wrote a simple, brief note. It had to be persuasive enough so the most powerful man in the planet would give it an eye. Is it possible to convince someone in just 4 paragraphs?

«They say its impossible and although I´m aware of the difficulty, I would like to ask you the favor of heeding this call and accepting my invitation» -Said one of them.

We discused if we should treat him in a formal manner or on the contrary, following our audacity, do it with informality.
We also explained that being a modest blog media we couldn´t appeal to the traditional paths and requests, but that we could make his message reach many people by using other ways and we reasoned it using the story behind the note´s trip.

«we can make your views over health reform, hope, the environment and solidarity reach to
other audiences using different paths, in the same way this note ended up your hands From
a remote corner in Madrid to the hands of the President of the USA.»

By September 2009, the note left Madrid. A few days later., in the middle of the night, we got a phone call: «The note has been delivered by Voinovich» said Ignacio.

Sometimes this work is a lot like fishing: you throw the hook and then wait quietly sitting at the pier. It seems it´s been long enough to catch the apparels back and going home with an empty basket. Perhaps the note never got to him, or maybe it did, but it wasnt persuasive enough. Anyway today it´s amusing to imagine that maybe one day, radiocable.com was in the hands of the most powerful man on earth.

FERNANDO BERLIN (SPAIN)
estudio@radiocable.com