About me
(I’m moving my personal site to Medium, and this is the about page.)
Hi there, I’m Cory Bergman, and I live in Seattle. I’m a product leader and entrepreneur with an award-winning track record in journalism innovation. (For a more formal look at my career so far, here’s my LinkedIn profile). I enjoy solving news problems, and I’ve focused on four areas of expertise:
- News utility: Maximizing signal over noise (and truth over fiction) to ensure each individual user gets the most value from the news.
- Real time: Creating community-driven products that operate in a “pre-trending” world of real-time information, i.e. public safety.
- Proximity: Informing users of the most valuable news and events taking place physically close to their current locations.
- Media innovation: Enabling media companies to try different approaches to get faster and better at innovation, i.e. internal startups.
Until recently I was co-founder and GM of Breaking News, which operated as an independent company inside NBC until it was shut down at the end of last year. From proximity alerts to virtual coverage, Breaking News’ many innovations are still unmatched — we won the top technical innovation award in journalism last year — but we were most proud of the incredible ways we helped our users around the world.
Prior to Breaking News, I was director of new product development at Msnbc Interactive, the joint venture between NBC and Microsoft. Charged with identifying and fostering innovative product efforts inside and outside the company, I created our first partnerships with Facebook and Twitter, acquired the hyperlocal company EveryBlock and helped lay the groundwork for the launch of Breaking News.
Concurrently, my wife and I co-founded a network of neighborhood blogs in Seattle called Next Door Media. This is where I began to learn about the fascinating dynamics of community, proximity and curation. Our first blog, MyBallard, became incredibly popular and won a national journalism award for community collaboration.
Before Msnbc Interactive, I ran the digital team at KING TV in Seattle after a few years as executive producer on the TV side. I worked in several other TV news roles spanning NBC News, KCPQ and KCRA, but my most memorable experience is the 6 weeks I worked at Ground Zero as a coordinating producer for NBC covering 9/11 and its aftermath.
If you were to trace all this back to its roots, you’d discover a 19-year old kid hunched over an old IBM PC at a tiny Spanish-language TV station, now known as KUVS in Sacramento, CA. Shocked by the use of typewriters in the newsroom, I wrote a program (in the now-archaic language of PASCAL) that combined a text editor with a rundown, enabling us to write the scripts, stack the newscast and time out the show.
A few years later, I launched one of the first blogs on the web, Lost Remote. It focused on how technology was changing the media business, showcasing new innovations, offering my ideas and admonishing newsrooms for neglecting their websites. It became a cult hit in the media world — a sort of early WIRED for the industry — and it ultimately sold to AdWeek.
I have a long history of urging media companies to take bigger bets — I predicted mobile’s disruption on journalism years ago — while simultaneously innovating on my own. That brings us to the one lesson I’ve learned about myself over the years: I enjoy making the future much more than talking about it.
Thanks for reading, and you can contact me at corybergman/at/gmail.com.
