Those of you watching President Barack Obama‘s first national press conference last night — and due to the blanket press coverage it was hard to miss — may have done a small double take when the President called on Sam Stein of The Huffington Post for a question. Considering the President only made time for 13 questions, and those left out included the Wall St Journal, Chicago Tribune, and Newsweek, the selection (journalists had been pre-selected by the White House) turned some heads. But hey, it’s supposed to be the Internet presidency right! And anyway, Stein asked a good question (in full after the jump).

We caught up with Stein, who in our opinion was remarkably composed last night, and asked him what it was like to be thrust into the Obama presser klieg lights.

I think this underscores just how far new media has come. I can’t pretend that it wasn’t great to be called on by the President. But I think this says more about the how journalism has changed and evolved. And, I should add, there are tons of other online reporters that deserve the chance (more than I probably did) to pose questions to the president.

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There are varying degrees on mainstream media recognition, and we’ve noted a number of times over the course of the last few months how the blogosphere has been infiltrating traditional media. In fact, today’s Times features a Style section trend piece about the arrival of the “year of the political blogger.” But all this pales in comparison to today’s HuffPo mention in Maureen Dowd‘s (super sharp) Sunday op-ed column about how the McCain camp has exhausted their candidate’s POW history.

As Sam Stein notes in The Huffington Post: “The senator has even brought his military record into discussion of his music tastes. Explaining that his favorite song was ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba, he offered that his knowledge of music ‘stopped evolving when his plane intercepted a surface-to-air missile.’ ‘Dancing Queen,’ however, was produced in 1975, eight years after McCain’s plane was shot down.”