1) The last decade has seen an explosion of new technologies. Which developments have had the biggest impact on your career in media and why?
I would say, in no particular order
- The smart phone — I wrote the first article for NPR on the iPhone. I should clarify: I didn't write the article on an iPhone; I wrote it about the iPhone, which came out only eight years ago, which is hard to imagine.
- APIs and structured data - They allow content to be disseminated to all sorts of devices, and content to be surfaced for all sorts of reasons.
- WAZE - WAZE is the coolest thing. It has basically replaced traffic reports by thinking about how people's phones move, in cars, in aggregate. I think a lot about WAZE and other things like WAZE -- and how communities could think about this.
- A decade ago, I was a senior in college. Reddit didn't exist. Twitter didn't exist. Tumblr didn't exist. Snapchat didn't exist. Yik-Yak didn't exist. Yo didn't exist. Uber didn't exist. Kickstarter didn't exist. Did YouTube exist? I don't think it did. I just point this out to say: all of this stuff is still relatively new, in the giant scheme of things.
2) Regarding the programs you developed as Digital Strategist at NPR: how have they helped NPR connect with their audience? Are they changing who that audience is?
I think that NPR is doing a really good job of being where their audience is. Their audience is on every one of the platforms I mentioned above. People don't have as many appointments with the radio, because they don't need to. Podcasts are readily available, and podcasts are an asynchronous listening experience, meaning you and I can listen at different times. That means that NPR can't rely on reaching its audience solely through the radio. So NPR has had to figure out strategies to reach audiences who may be listening to the same content at different times — and that was largely what I and others tried to work on.
3) What are the coolest things you can do as a media professional in the 21st century which you would not have been able to do in the 20th century?
Send live video through your phone at the scene of a rally in Ferguson and immediately have your video livestreamed to your entire audience. There's no need for an entire crew and satellites.
Verifying information from people who are on the scene of something newsworthy. You can search Twitter by latitude and longitude. You can find eye witness reports. You can watch people track down suspects and then work, as a journalist, to verify that information.
You can reach your audience directly instead of waiting for whatever time the paper publishes or the radio report goes out. It's immediate. And then you get feedback from the audience, and can adapt immediately. The feedback loop has shortened considerably.
Also, you can Yo people.
4) What are the advantages, in your experience, of being "platform agnostic" rather than tethered to a particular medium?
The mediums change very quickly and it's expensive to adapt. It's really important to have APIs and structured data so that when they jump, you can too. Otherwise, you're behind. Who knows how people will be publishing in X years?
5) What makes Twitter an important resource for journalists? What about Tumblr?
A NPR, we told reporters "Pick the social network that works for you. We don't want you everywhere. We want you somewhere." For some reporters, Twitter is the place to be to find stories, connect with sources, stay engaged with their colleagues and audiences, and track breaking news. For other reporters, that place is Facebook or Reddit or Pinterest or WhatsApp or Tumblr. The #thedress story bubbled up on Tumblr. They're all just different platforms that have different communities and there's no one-size-fits-all solution. It depends on your beat and what your goal is.
6) What does it mean for an organization or individual to have a "brand" in today's media landscape? How have you made use of branding in your own career?
I don't know. I hate thinking of myself as a brand and I don't think I have one. I'm a person and I try to build things and make things with people, and not for people. Which basically means including them in the process and getting feedback as you go. If that's a brand, so be it. I think of it more as being accessible and sharing knowledge. It's very important to me to be open and transparent about my own work and I try to work with people who feel similarly. I don't know if that's a brand or an ethos. I hate the word ethos though. I'll just say: I act the same way on the Internet as I do in real life, and I've always enjoyed sharing and helping people in real life.
7) How has your knowledge of coding/programming helped your work in media?
It has helped immensely. Even being able to just speak the language allows you to a) read code (and there are stories in code) b) talk to developers c) automate the parts of your work that you hate doing. I'm not the world's best programmer but I can automate simple tasks for myself, which allows me more time to be creative. For instance, I can scrape a website and put bits of that website into an Excel sheet, which I can then analyze. That's a lot of manual work that I can do pretty quickly. Investigative reporters can scour large databases very quickly doing something similar.
8) How do you develop expertise in innovative technology when everything changes so fast?
You surround yourself with really smart, open people who you can bounce ideas off of when you have a question. This also means you answer questions when they have them. I really love the kind of work I do, so it doesn't feel like work. I'm sure I'm not on top of everything, but I know who to reach out to - or what to look up, or who to ask what to look up - if I have a question.