Remember last year’s State of the City address, San Francisco government’s annual status report speech? If he were alive, Marshall McLuhan might: Mayor Gavin Newsom’s medium drowned out his message, as most folks remember only that the Mayor posted seven and a half hours of videos to YouTube, and dared not dive in to actually watch the speech (as of Monday, Newsom’s first “webisode” from last year has 14,000 hits; other webisodes, like “Census Challenge,” have fewer than 150).
But Newsom still loves policy, and he still loves technology. To that end, the Mayor on Friday kicked off what could be a new weekly tradition: a “week-in-review” speech, in which he holds forth on the week that was in San Francisco and posts the results on YouTube.
He’s already made news we can use on the ‘Tube, using the bully Webcam to announce eviction protection legislation. To be introduced on Tuesday, Newsom’s legislation is aimed at protecting tenants who live in a foreclosed property (and only tenants who live in a foreclosed property; his promise to veto more expansive legislation passed last week still stands).
Newsom also said he’ll be releasing the bad budget news — or at least his midyear reduction targets, or the amounts by which city departments must slash their ledgers very, very soon — on Thursday, right after he returns from Washington, DC to advocate for JobsNowSF (more on that later) and to lobby the Navy to hand over Treasure Island.
In Friday’s premiere edition (316 views by Monday afternoon) Newsom also did an awful lot of praising, lauding the following as highlights for a “pretty remarkable week”:
–He praised Project Homeless Connect, which hosted its 32nd event in five years on Wednesday in which “literally 965 volunteers” served “exactly 1964 clients”;
–He praised Muni for doing a very solid job of alerting its riders to its massive route changes, though he mentioned by name the 41-Union and 10-Townsend as lines needing attention;
–He praised the $70 million supportive housing development just opened at 10th and Mission, and “forget all the bad news about the economy” — more new supportive housing units are on the way;
–He praised JobsNowSF, the federally-funded program in which (his example) a business can get a worker’s $135,000 annual salary paid by the federal government.
In terms of usefulness, it seems like these weekly updates could be an improvement on the State of the City model (one 12 minute address every week = 10 1/2 hours a year, in much easier-to-digest chunks), but considering Newsom’s ambitious travel schedule, it might be hard to commit to weekly updates.
