Quick update from the The Washington Post newsroom: starting July 1, I will join the foreign desk as the world and national security producer. Anup Kaphle (who has been the world/national security web editor on the Universal News Desk) and I will be moving from the UND to work directly with the world and national security teams.
I’ve had a great experience working with the health, science, environment and wellness reporters and editors since I joined the Post in December and am very excited at this new opportunity be a full member of the foreign editing team — truly integrated with the section.
I’m excited to announce that, beginning Dec. 6, I will be joining The Washington Post as a web producer on the Universal News Desk.
I’m thrilled at the opportunity to work with CoryHaik (I’ll be reporting directly to her), the UND team and other awesome journalists throughout the newsroom. My focus will be on breaking news and working with the national desk to produce their health and environmental coverage, with engagement tied at the heart of everything.
Overall, I can’t wait to get back into the newsroom, collaborate with other areas I have experience or interest in (such as the programming, design, video, engagement and other teams) and do awesome work. I’ll be sure to let you all know more about the job after I start and see how the role evolves.
Why the job change?
Publish2 is moving to Los Angeles and, after a serious decision-making process, I decided for personal reasons that I wanted to stay in the D.C. area. Thus, we have amicably parted ways. The move is good news for Publish2 (stay tuned for more details on that soon), but L.A. is not for me at this time.
I want to emphasize that this was a personal decision to stay. Publish2 has been a unique and invaluable experience for me since I began in September 2009. My first full-time job out of college (see Publish2’s announcement), I learned many things about technology and business first-hand while working at a small start-up. My co-workers have been great and I’ve enjoyed working on tools that help journalists and news organizations.
Northern Virginia has been my physical home for the past year and the D.C. journalism-technology community has become my family here. From friends and acquaintances to meetups and conferences, deep down I know this is right place for me at this point in my life.
With that in mind, I’m also moving from Ashburn, Va. to Arlington, Va. (orange line on the metro, w00t!). No longer will I need to drive to the metro to get into D.C. I’ll leave it to you to imagine how many more meetups it will be possible for me to attend…
Today I’m attending the 2010 New Media Women Entrepreneurs Summit, organized by J-Lab and hosted at the Kaiser Family Foundation in downtown DC. Follow along with a liveblog and curated tweets:
As someone who started out as a primarily “print” reporter, my mindset — and, more specifically, my thinking — as a journalist continues to evolve after nearly eight years in the field, starting as a high school sophomore.
How would you characterize the relationship between mindset and thinking? Which one is derivative from the other?
More specifically, I’d say that I’ve long had an open mind(set) in the journalism realm. For at least a couple of years, I considered this one of the most important characteristics for a journalist — along with passion. I still think this is true.
Recently I’ve become fascinated with “computational thinking” (more on that later) and wonder if my mindset is informed by this “new” way of thinking or vice versa.
As Lauren Rabaino (@laurenmichell) and I discussed on IM early this week, my tweet was something of a chicken-and-egg question. As Lauren said (and I agree):
your mindset impacts thinking which impacts mindset which impacts thinking… etc for infinity
So why am I thinking about this now? Well, for one, I’ve proposed a session (with the same name of this post) for Saturday’s BarCamp NewsInnovation in Philadelphia: Rethinking our Thinking. The description:
Journalists often discuss the need for evolving skill sets. On a deeper level, we sometimes talk about mindsets. What I’m interested in currently is, “How can we reshape our thinking?”
Computational Thinking and Computing lecture by Wing, the which you can watch below or download as a video podcast [slides].
Finally, there is the Center for Computational Thinking at Carnegie Mellon, the university where Wing worked when she wrote the original article.
Evolving Interests
All of this comes in the larger context of my interest in learning more coding, an ongoing process that I started taking to the next level last summer with JavaScript. I put that on hold as I focused on a project using a JavaScript framework and then picked up back up for a bit before moving on to PHP and MySQL around the fall/winter. I used a little PHP for a small side project and mostly put learning that on hold too.
More recently I’ve stepped back and am looking at coding from a broader perspective. This coincides both with my role in helping to organize the first Hacks and Hackers event in DC as part of the May 4 ONA DC meetup at American University. Also related, is last week’s launch of the Hacks and Hackers forum, where I serve as a community moderator.
So, basically: Whereas before I was interested in teaching myself some coding languages to enhance my skill set, I’m currently focusing more on learning about the fundamentals of programming and computational thinking (with the practical skills on the side for now).
Is this an essential step in learning to code? No. Has it been and will continue to be helpful? Most definitely.
The discussion of the “programmer-journalist” (can we find abetter name?) arguably started middle of last decade, so what has lead me to this point? I plan to delve into that with another post.
