Barack Obama will keep his BlackBerry, AFP is reporting. He says it’s important for him to maintain a connection to people outside the White House and Washington. Here’s why, as he explained in a recent interview on CNBC:

It’s not just the flow of information. I mean, I can get somebody to print out clips for me, and I can read newspapers.

What it has to do with is having mechanisms where you are interacting with people who are outside of the White House in a meaningful way. And I’ve got to look for every opportunity to do that–ways that aren’t scripted, ways that aren’t controlled…

In another interview on CNN, he answered questions about how he plans to deal with the security and privacy of what he sends:

Now, my working assumption, and this is not new, is that everything I write on e-mail could end up being on CNN. So I make sure that — to think before I press ‘send.’”

The image above comes from a contest held by the New York Daily News. The newspaper asked a group of ad agencies to create fake ads based on Obama’s BlackBerry love. Click the image above to get a closer look, and head over to the Daily News website to see the rest.