SF Mayor Newsom Takes His 7.5-Hour Case to YouTube

When you want to avoid edits and pesky coworkers and just get your message out to the people, the Internet is your friend. And that’s what San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is doing on YouTube this week, posting a 7.5-hour single-take speech broken up into video segments to the site.

Newsom is famously wonky and long-winded, so this year he’s showing his true colors by using YouTube an alternative platform to addressing his annual hour-long State of the City speech to city officials, according to a story today in the San Francisco Chronicle . He’s making use of a loophole in the City Charter that doesn’t explicitly say he has to be there in person to present his policies and budget priorities to the Board of Supervisors. Newsom described the approach as “unfiltered.” YouTube also serves as an appropriate global stage for Newsom’s ambitions, which extend beyond the City by the Bay.

It seems unimaginable that people will seriously watch the whole harangue, even local supervisors. But then again, it also seems unimaginable that Newsom and his poor staff could film the entire speech in a single take that finished at 1 a.m. one evening last week.