Why I became a Product Manager even though I love reporting

Earlier this month, I was in New York City for work and I attended a party celebrating the launch of Deca (@decastories), an international journalism cooperative. Though available in a Web app and through partnerships with other publications, the bulk of their stories are distributed primarily through mobile devices such as the iPad, its iPhone app and through Amazon’s Kindle Singles.

There’s an inevitable question that always comes up at events like these: How much do journalists have to care about the technology on which their work is created and consumed?

Now, I’m not going to get back into the tired debate on whether or not journalists should learn to code. My opinion on this is that while it would be great if we could all code as easily as we write, you should at least be aware of what’s possible with the technology you’re dealing with. That will help you when you’re thinking about the story and the best way to tell it. The more diverse your skill set, the more potentially effective forms your story could take. And after you have crafted this story in whatever form it is best suited to (text, photo, video, data visualization … aka multimedia), you have to help that story have the impact you were hoping for. That means making it as accessible as possible for your potential interested audience.

If you’re a journalist that doesn’t have an interest in having some say over how your story lives online, then you’re basically handing over your hard work to someone who gets to decide how people are going to discover, share and engage with it.

I’ve been fortunate enough this early in my career to have had jobs which gave me the opportunity to think about the impact technology can have on digital content. I went to UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism specifically to focus on “new media journalism.” While I love writing as a reporter, I always found myself drawn to technology, which is why I started interning at Storify, a start-up hoping to interweave interactive social content with context and narrative, rather than a publication during my first year. I learned a lot about how to decide which features to build, which things our users loved and hated and wanted. I became really passionate about solving their problems and started dreaming about influencing the platforms and technologies that reporters would use to create and promote their stories. At the same time, I was still a journalism student, so I was able to report and write my own stories. My professors were telling me to let the story dictate the medium while teaching us data journalism and multimedia packaging techniques. I could still count myself as a journalist while working in technology. This was the best of both worlds for me.

That freedom came to an end for me when I graduated and had to decide if I wanted to be a reporter at a news organization or if I wanted to take a product manager role at Storify. I struggled personally because I wanted so much to be a journalist but didn’t know if it was fair to define myself that way anymore. I thought about how amazing it is to have the privilege to “tell the untold story” in a way that interests our audience and changes the way they understand and see the world. To make people care. And then, I re-read a Facebook Note (remember those?) I wrote in July 2008 in the midst of the massive layoffs happening in newsrooms everywhere, ranting against curmudgeons, wild with optimism for the future of journalism. Here’s the last paragraph, which made the decision clear for me.

50 years from now, when you look at the field of journalism and how it has changed, you’ll wish you had been here. It was a time when things were open and the way was unclear. It was probably very unsure and scary, but ideas were tossed up and juggled that normally would have been shunted aside.

So I chose technology. I chose Storify. I chose to be a product manager to try to help shape the future of journalism in any small way I could. Because maybe I could go back to reporting some day, but even in 2012 when I was making this decision, the future of digital journalism was as wide open as ever.

So at the Deca launch party, I was drinking my red wine out of a plastic cup, standing amidst the brave reporters working together in our new age of journalism, and I wondered again: How much do journalists have to care about the technology on which their work is created and consumed? For me, the answer is that we must care deeply, and be actively aware and opinionated of what’s happening and possible in the space our stories live. The operative word being actively. These problems we have with creating engaging content and then reaching and engaging an audience are not problems that others or even other departments in your own newsroom will be able to solve alone. You, the journalist, must be involved. You, the journalist, must be active. Because if you aren’t, then someone else will be. Someone else will help shape the future of content, not just journalism, online.