During his visit yesterday to Amazon’s warehouse in Chattanooga, Tenn., President Obama sat down for an exclusive one-on-one interview with a media behemoth. Not the New York Times or the Washington Post. The interview was conducted by Amazon itself.
David Blum, the editor of the Kindle Singles program, interviewed Obama, and Amazon just released a transcript as a free Kindle Single. It’s the second installment in a new Kindle Singles interview series that debuted last week with Shimon Peres, the President of Israel.
In the introduction to the Obama piece, Blum explains that, when the White House floated the idea, he initially thought about having someone else conduct the interview.
“But it wasn’t the star interviewer they wanted to reach, as it turned out,” he writes. “It was the Amazon customer, the Americans who wanted — or got — the jobs that Obama was so dearly determined to create.”
In fact, the arrangement with Amazon rankled some White House reporters including one from CNN who asked if the Obama administration was sidestepping the “traditional media” to get the message out.
I’m still reading the interview, but at first glance, the questions are certainly more big picture than Obama would have gotten from a White House beat reporter. One example: “Are you at all surprised at how difficult and elusive the goal of creating hope has been?”
The interview is available for download here.
