Dorien Luyckx: A digital storyteller finding new, engaging ways to cover tech
Dorien Luyckx is creating new and engaging digital storytelling products to explore the impact that technology has on the people who use it and on the societies in which they live.
Her background: Dorien grew up asking questions relentlessly. With such natural curiosity, it is no wonder she chose a career path as a journalist and digital storytelling producer.
Dorien works at the Belgian financial newspaper De Tijd as a tech reporter, writing stories for both print and online that reach more than 150,000 readers. In previous roles as a digital storytelling producer, she has created several multimedia projects using 360° video/images, Snapchat Spectacles, animations, social video and data visualizations.
She’s an alumni of the Master’s program in Digital Journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has given classes on Mobile Journalism (MoJo), digital newsgathering, and 360° for professional journalists. She was one of the media experts at Hack Belgium to guide teams in creating solutions for the media.
In addition, together with other digital journalists, she curates the Slack channel Digital Journalism Rocks, about which she was interviewed by Google’s Digital News Initiative. She also organizes events for the Belgian group Mediamadammen for women in media.
An idea takes shape…
A true millennial, Dorien’s natural love for tech grew throughout the training she engaged in as a digital journalist working with data, coding, and creating video.
In her work for Belgian newspaper De Tijd, she covered plenty of exciting topics, like robotics and cybersecurity. But what interests her more than anything are stories that involve bigger questions around technology: how does it impact us as people? How does it impact society?
She finds that tech coverage in Belgium, and in Europe more broadly, is usually focused on what is new and exciting, and rarely explores these bigger, deeper questions. So she sees a real opportunity to engage not only with an audience that is interested in tech, but also with people who are interested in hearing about tech from other angles. That includes, for example, psychologists, historians, and philosophers who ask questions around the ethics of tech.
Inspired by creative new digital products coming out of organizations like Quartz, The New York Times, and The Pudding, Dorien knew New York was the place to be to develop some of her ideas.
Her project for the 2018 Tow-Knight Fellowship in Entrepreneurial Journalism
During her Fellowship, Dorien plans to build a digital strategy for a medium focused on in-depth tech coverage, so it can eventually evolve into a stand-alone online media outlet.
The new kinds of stories she wants to tell might start with the personal, in ways that make tech topics resonate with a broad audience. For example, AI technology exists that is designed to replicate YOU, through time you spend communicating with it. How long until we consider such an algorithm a being in its own right? Could it ever become a meaningful replacement of you?
As a millennial herself, Dorien knows that readers often are not getting their news directly from publishers’ websites. She wants to explore ways of bringing these new kinds of tech stories to readers where they are, whether scrolling through Facebook and other social platforms, subscribing to newsletters, engaging with chatbots, and on whatever new platforms come next. And she thinks that engagement is key to unlocking revenue.
Goals for Tow-Knight Fellowship
Dorien is excited to harness the knowledge, network and resources available through CUNY to prototype new products. She is giving herself space to move on the project, but definitely wants to learn how to create a great newsletter that attracts a core loyal audience, and how to make engaging chatbots.
[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.]
