Amelia Pisapia: Editors Over Algorithms
Amelia Pisapia’s route to the 2018 Tow-Knight Fellowship in Entrepreneurial Journalism runs from her home town, Chicago, through Rome, Madison (where she completed an undergraduate degree in journalism, and worked for Wisconsin Public Television), to London and finally New York City. Here, she specializes in working at the intersection of online editorial strategy and marketing.
As a senior editor at the content marketing platform NewsCred, Amelia helped create a network of freelance writers, managed a team of editors, and consulted with the venture’s corporate clients on content marketing strategy. She also founded and worked as the editorial director of Novel, a creative agency formed by the New Republic to bring an editorial mindset to for-client work.
Novel got early positive early buzz thanks to a poetic look at sleep that Amelia commissioned for the mattress-in-a-box venture Casper. But shortly after launch New Republic was sold, and the new owner opted to fold Novel, laying off the entire business team. So Amelia founded her own independent consulting agency, where she advises clients on content strategy as well as generating revenue from their editorial endeavors.
“I’m interested in writing, visuals, and new ways to fund the two,” Amelia told her cohort at CUNY during the first week’s introductory “lifestories.” The common thread through all her work has been “figuring out new ways to monetize editorial thinking.”
As a 2018 Tow-Knight Fellow, Amelia wants to research how to use news judgement and editorial thinking to guard against bias in tech. According to recent research, she says, engineers are unable to model editorial values in the systems they build, including the algorithms that control how and where information appears online. That’s partly because many engineers don’t understand those editorial values and the companies they work for don’t make a priority that they should.
“There are a lot of technology companies functioning as media companies, but they don’t admit they’re media companies. That’s led to a whole host of problems,” says Amelia. “I’d like use editorial thinking to explore solutions to these problems.”
[This is part of a series of peer profiles introducing the 2018 class of Tow-Knight Entrepreneurial Journalism fellows at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.]
