Here are some local ways you might cover the inauguration.
Ask your readers/viewers/online users to send photos of themselves watching the inauguration to a Flickr feed page.
Spend the morning with a donor who helped to fund the campaign.
Find an Obama campaign donor here. Obviously, you can watch the inauguration with kids in classrooms. I would ask first-graders, "What do presidents do, why do we need one?" Do little kids still want to grow up to be president?
Consider holding a live chat with your public using a service like
CoveritLive.com. Chat right through the speech.
Joe Biden will be taking the oath of office, too. Talk about a guy who has been lost in the shadows. If you asked 100 people who Obama's vice president is, I wonder how many would know.
Has there been a surge in people
naming babies Barack or Obama since the election?
AOL said:
The New York Times reported that the names Barack, Obama, Michelle, Malia and Sasha have inspired first and middle names across the country.
A president named Obama could break down the perception "that there is such a thing as a 'normal' name," said Laura Wattenberg, a name expert and author who runs the blog
The Baby Name Wizard. Barack has never made the top 1,000 names in the U.S., although it is expected to
shoot up the charts now.
Presidential naming trends have happened before. Franklin surged to number 33 in 1933, and Lincoln, Kennedy and Reagan became popular in the 1990s. Obama, however, is a much less common surname than those of past presidents.
The Washington Post reports that there are about 11,000 Clinton families and 60,000 Bush families in the U.S., while there may be fewer than 20 families named Obama.
Inaugural fashion is a fairly deal. Over the decades, what the new First Lady wears to the ball sets a tone.
See this from PBS' "NewsHour." The
chatter over what Michelle Obama will wear at the inauguration and at the ball(s) has taken over the fashion world.
Some even suggest she could save the women's fashion industry, which has seen high-end sales wane.
The clothes the Obama children wear has also received a good deal of attention. See this story from
The New York Times about the influence of First Ladies on fashion.
Obama's acceptance speech has been
ranked at about the 9th grade level on the Flesch-Kincaid formula. Where will his inaugural speech rank compared to
previous ones?
