CBS’ Bob Schieffer happily admits that he’s not the most tech-savvy journalist in the industry. “But I have all these young people and my grandchildren, of course, who know about all this stuff,” he laughed. And so he’s pretty pumped about CBS’ new partnership with Google.
The main reason for that, Schieffer said, is that he will host Google Hangouts several times a month online with the best parts ending up on his Sunday show, “Face the Nation.” Google Hangouts are a group video chat interface that, as a bonus, allows the moderator to draw on his or her guests.
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“The thing I found out about the Google Hangout is you can actually put little hats on people, there’s an app where you can draw hats, you can draw horns, I was just thinking this is really good, this might be kinda fun sometime,” Schieffer told Yeas & Nays Monday night at a party celebrating the new alliance. “On ‘Face the Nation’ when they don’t answer the question we just have to go on to another question, now we can put a mustache on them,” he added. Unfortunately for us, Schieffer wouldn’t reveal who in Washington he might like to give a ‘stache to. “I’m not going to say, we’ll wait and see,” he laughed.
The party, at the Fathom Creative event space on 14th Street, attracted a number of journos and friends. In the crowd we caught CBS’ Washington Bureau Chief Chris Isham alongside colleagues Chris Licht and Norah O’Donnell, former “Hardball” producer Tammy Haddad, Politico’s Roger Simon and Mike Allen, CNN’s Peter Hamby and Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet.
As party favors everyone received a pair of purple tube socks branded with the Google+ and “Face the Nation” logos as a nod to Schieffer’s daily wear of purple socks. “When [Texas Christian University] was playing in the Rose Bowl…I said if TCU wins this game I’ll wear purple socks for the rest of my life and they won,” Schieffer explained. “But I do have more than one pair,” he grinned.
