Obama to Discuss Housing with Zillow CEO, Answer Public Questions

President Obama is certainly hamming it up with Seattle-based companies lately.

Just last week, Obama toured a Chattanooga, TN, warehouse owned by Amazon, giving a speech on jobs policy and granting an interview with the editor of Amazon’s Kindle Singles publishing arm.

This week, the president is sitting down with Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff, who will moderate a discussion about housing policy. The talk, happening Wednesday in Los Angeles, will include some questions from the public collected through social media channels.

It’ll be streamed online Wednesday at 10 am Pacific time at zillow.com/whitehouse and whitehouse.gov.

It’s an interesting media strategy for the White House, which is going direct to voters through non-editorial interviewers in the business and tech communities—the Amazon interview was released as a free Kindle download.

That kind of bypassing move usually gets hard-news organizations pretty riled up, since even regular news conferences with presidents are very rare these days.

It’s a nice honor for Rascoff, the young CEO who in 2011 presided over the Seattle area’s first tech IPO in a long while. As Rascoff noted on Twitter, the company also has the little matter of a quarterly earnings report to deal with (among other slightly more mundane CEO things).

Author: Curt Woodward

Curt covered technology and innovation in the Boston area for Xconomy. He previously worked in Xconomy’s Seattle bureau and continued some coverage of Seattle-area tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft. Curt joined Xconomy in February 2011 after nearly nine years with The Associated Press, the world's largest news organization. He worked in three states and covered a wide variety of beats for the AP, including business, law, politics, government, and general mayhem. A native Washingtonian, Curt earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. As a past president of the state's Capitol Correspondents Association, he led efforts to expand statehouse press credentialing to online news outlets for the first time.