Some personal news

I'm now a journalism student at City College!

Before I get into that, yes, this means I am not at Hustle anymore. I was going to wait to announce this publicly online until after the news already leaked, but surprisingly, it hasn't yet, as far as I can tell. (Which is surprising, because the last time they downsized, it was reported in a few places.) In any case, I hope Hustle continues to succeed, and I had a great time there, but that time ended about a month ago.

Anyway, I found myself without a job and needed to decide what to do next. Being a software engineer has been really rewarding for me, but I decided to take advantage of this moment to try and explore journalism, which is something I've been curious about for a little while. This might seem like a strange jump, going from tech to journalism, but there are a few reasons I was drawn to it.

For one thing, I've been really interested in hearing journalists talk about journalism, which they seem to be doing a lot lately. I've paid a lot more attention to political news, since Trump got elected, as I'm sure many of us have. It seems like he says something shocking or horrifying every day, and it's been eye-opening to see how it gets covered. How to report on this government seems to be a huge and important challenge, so the critiques of how political reporters are doing that, are really timely right now. I would recommend Strikethrough, Citations Needed, and Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press in particular.

The election of Trump also led me to think about other types of power, besides that of elections. Immediately after the 2016 election, I started asking, "What the hell? How could this happen? What can I do?" and a lot of the answers I found, in places like Tech Workers Coalition and the Democratic Socialists of America, had to do with the power of ordinary people, not voting (or at least, not just voting) but organizing, in their communities, and particularly in their workplaces. I had already been a little bit involved in worker organizing at Google, but ratcheted it up a little bit in my last year or two there. Even though Google sometimes feels like a very small community where information can travel quickly, it seemed to travel a lot more quickly when there was a reputable news outlet talking about it. Drawing attention to an issue externally was very often the best way to draw attention to it internally. And it was harder for senior executives to pretend an issue was being raised by just a handful of disgruntled Googlers whose concerns don't really represent any mainstream population, when the same concerns were raised in an article that was being shared widely. So even as I was increasingly aware of the power of workers, especially when they are unionized or otherwise organized, I also became more aware of the power of good reporting to effect change by revealing what was happening. Especially for issues at companies like Google, where the technical details can be hard to follow and the company tends to be very secretive.

I also got to attend a couple of free workshops in the last few years, one about journalism from Tim Redmond at 48 Hills, and one about freedom of information requests from Freddy Martinez at Lucy Parsons Labs. Both of them went into some detail on tools that reporters can use to investigate stories, and even though I wasn't really thinking about pursuing journalism in any serious way, at the time, I thought that type of work sounded like a lot of fun.

Then, in the last few weeks as I've been thinking about this, I got in touch with several journalists, and when I told them I was thinking about getting into their field, they were overwhelmingly encouraging and helpful. I know that news outlets are financially struggling these days, so I kind of expected people to be a lot more defensive or gatekeeper-y, but I'm glad they weren't. So to anyone that I chatted with about this, thank you! And to anyone I didn't, sorry! This has been kind of sudden, and I haven't had a chance to contact everyone yet.

Finally, I know it's hard to believe, but the 2016 election did bring some good things, and one of them was Proposition W, which made City College free for San Francisco residents. Since I voted for it, I feel like I might as well take advantage of it, right?

Anyway, I will probably be primarily focused on class assignments for the next few months, but feel free to send me ideas for blog posts, stories, etc. and maybe I can write them up on here.