The 2008 presidential election sparked the largest voter turnout since 1960, and the historic inauguration of the nation’s first African American president is sure to be one of the biggest stories of 2009. Your readers can experience the event, without having to fight the crowds or stand in the cold.

The TreeHouse Media Project will be producing four days of exclusive inauguration coverage beginning with President-elect Obama’s train ride from Philadelphia to Washington and continuing into the wee hours of the inaugural balls.

Featuring broadcast-quality video by experienced television and newspaper journalists, this package will cover the color and pomp of the inauguration and provide a sobering look at the challenges facing the president elect. And we’ll provide tools so that local residents who make the trip to Washington can post their videos and photos on your website.

More than two million people are expected to crowd Washington for the inauguration Jan. 20. Millions more will watch on TV and the Internet. If you want a share of this huge audience, review our tentative story schedule and the credentials of our reporting team below. Then contact Rich Heidorn to find out how you and your readers can join the party.

Rich Heidorn: phone: 202-577-9221 // email: rich <dot> heidorn AT treehouse-media <dot> net

Story schedule (tentative)

Here are some of the features we are planning:

1. Throwing a party for two million. Housing, moving and feeding the millions expected to converge on Washington will create an unparalleled logistical challenge and a windfall for hotels and restaurants. From the hotels to the subways to the Secret Service, we’ll provide a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to throw the biggest party of 2009.

2. Changing of the guard: Barack Obama and George W. Bush aren’t the only ones who will be changing addresses and careers Jan. 20. The Obama administration is bringing an estimated 8,000 new hires to the federal government. Hundreds of other newcomers will arrive with more than 60 freshmen members of Congress. The switch to Democratic control is causing ripples throughout the nation’s capital, from the lobbyists on K Street to the socialites in Georgetown and the diplomats on Embassy Row.

3. Cinderella tries to get into the ball. There are 10 official Inaugural Balls and at least 45 unofficial ones. Celebrities from the film and music world will be taking a break from the Sundance Film Festival and the Hollywood awards season to be part of history. We’ll be there to capture the fun and glamour. We’ll also profile the businessman who spent $1 million so that he could invite disadvantaged people, wounded soldiers and others to an inauguration ball he’s calling the People’s Inaugural Project.

4. A civil rights milestone. Among the president-elect’s special guests are the Little Rock Nine, the nine courageous African Americans who integrated Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957, and the Tuskegee airmen, the first African-American pilots in the U.S. military. The inauguration of the nation’s first African American president is sure to be an emotional moment for these civil rights pioneers. A look at how U.S. race relations have changed since the days of Jim Crow, and the challenges that remain in 2009.

5. Now comes the hard part. As candidate, Barack Obama made lots of promises to lots of constituent groups. As president, he has to find a way to persuade Congress to join his vision and to overcome opposition from well-entrenched trade groups and other lobbyists. Then there’s the small matter of paying for it all.

Our team

Anchor & Chief Correspondent: Camilla Carr is an award-winning journalist, media consultant and media trainer. Camilla is a former reporter and anchor for CBS and ABC affiliates in Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and New Haven. Her consulting clients have included the International Olympic Committee, the World Bank, Discovery Communications and the Veterans Administration.

Contributing Editor: Hank Klibanoff, former Managing Editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a former editor and reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for history for The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation, with co-author Gene Roberts.

Producer & Correspondent: Rich Heidorn Jr. is a veteran political and investigative reporter and editor who began working in Internet publishing in 1999. At The Philadelphia Inquirer he covered the New Jersey legislature, Supreme Court and governor’s office as well as numerous Congressional campaigns. He has won national and state journalism awards for his investigative and business reporting.

Correspondent: Thomas J. Walsh is an experienced business writer who began working in Internet media in 1999. He began his career as a U.S. Navy broadcast journalist, reporting from the U.S.S. Forrestal and the island of Diego Garcia. He is a former reporter for the Philadelphia Business Journal, Reno (NV) Gazette-Journal and Cherry Hill (NJ) Courier-Post. He also has written for trade publications and Knowledge@Wharton, the online business journal of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Correspondent: Christopher Wink is a young journalist, video blogger and world traveler who has studied in Africa and reported from Japan, China and 10 countries in Eastern and Western Europe. His writing has appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and other publications. While in Japan he was a video blogger for NBC’s web program Junior Year Abroad. He was named among the 100 top young journalists by UWire, a college news service.

Graphic Designer: Leslie McMurchie is a former graphic artist for The Boeing Company and Rodale Press, publishers of Prevention and Men’s Health magazines.

Videographer, video editor: Paul Zingone is a videographer with experience in linear and non-linear editing who has been shooting for news video for broadcast news shows since graduating from Penn State University. He’s also an artist and musician.

Chief Technology Consultant: Brandon Maddox is the Web Administrator for the National Association of Social Workers, a Washington, D.C.-based organization representing 150,000 professionals. He is an experienced and dynamic teacher for the Graduate School, USDA, with expertise in WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Dreamweaver, Flash, Quark, Illustrator and Photoshop.

Webmaster: Ben Heidorn is a web designer and a coding whiz, with experience ranging from XHTML and CSS to Java, C++, and PHP. Currently, he is building several web applications in pursuit of wild riches. He is studying physics and computer programming at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Examples of our work

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