I interviewed This American Life contributing editor Jack Hitt for the MAKE blog – read part 1 here, part 2 here. Our discussion was around the notion of the amateur and American amateurism as a re-emerging phenomenon – but in my mind Jack is best known for his Bush-era 2006 broadcast & 2007 update including interviews with former Guantanamo prisoners, and the principle of habeas corpus. His other broadcasts can be found here.

From my interview:

Amateurs gather where some discipline is in distress and where innovation is waiting. So, I went looking for those places. Consider my own world of journalism. In the last few decades, the stately media have become high-born press agents, carefully reciting reports handed to them by a semi-permanent bureaucracy in Washington, DC. Then, along came bloggers, swarming the fortress of official journalism, painfully reminding the inhabitants what afflicting the comfortable actually means.

Read part 1 of the interview here.
Read part 2 of the interview here.