The Day the Mashup Debate Died

After months of promoting its “Mashup Debate” with Slate and The Huffington Post, Yahoo decided to pull the plug on the “mashup” part of the debate at the last minute.

This version of a Democratic Presidential debate was supposed to straddle the line between the staid traditional debates and the YouTube debate that happened earlier this year. Slate, Huffington Post, and Yahoo audiences could submit questions on video, but Charlie Rose would ask the questions to candidates in a one-on-one setting via satellite this week. All the raw footage would then go to Yahoo’s Jumpcut video-editing site, where you could cut and paste the candidates’ answers as you like.

Only now you can’t. But my question is: who didn’t see this coming?

According to Wired, Yahoo et. al. ran out of time before they could let the candidates know the footage would be on Jumpcut. I think a more realistic (and completely unsubstantiated) take would be the candidates finally figured out what Jumpcut was and panicked as visions of themselves edited into a bathroom stall conversation with Senator Craig virally spread like wildfire across the Internets of their minds.

Of course the candidates (or at least their managers) weren’t going to make it easier for you to put them in compromising positions. Why should they? The video from the debate will still be made available, but if you want to do Hillary 1984-esque mashup, then by God you’re going to have to work for it.

Status Quo: 1 Innovation: 0

Update: It looks like the “mashup” part of the Yahoo, Slate, HuffPo Presidential Debate is back on. Mash away at JumpCut.