Time for a new adventure

In this case, adventure is at Duke!

Over the course of a week last summer, I made a few huge, rapid-fire life changes. I left my job as a Web producer with News 14 Carolina, married the love of my life and started (essentially) a brand new career as one of the editorial advisers at N.C. State Student Media.

While the timing was mild insanity, the decisions themselves weren’t difficult. Two great years at the station transformed me from a print guy clueless about the TV news business to a specialist in Web editing, breaking news and social media. I had managed to find a beautiful, intelligent woman who puts up with (nay, encourages) my love of video games, sci-fi movies and fantasy novels. And the new production assistant gig gave me the opportunity to return to my alma mater and work with the very publications that made me the journalist I am today.

I figured the new job would be a four-year investment, minimum. I wanted to see the students I advised graduate and move on. I wanted to see young writers, photographers and designers work their way up to editors. I wanted to see these publications grow.

Then I got a phone call.

After a few weeks of conversation with some amazing people, that phone call eventually turned into a job offer from Duke University. The choice was more difficult than the ones I made last summer, but I found it was impossible to turn down this new adventure.

So I’m very excited to say that as of early November, I’ll be an associate in research at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, working under the immensely talented journalist and Knight professor Sarah Cohen. Specifically, I’ll be heading up community engagement with her Reporter’s Lab project, which aims to reduce the costs of computer-aided investigative journalism by evaluating and deploying technology to help reporters dig through public affairs data and documents more efficiently and effectively.

Here are the specifics from the job description (as they stand now at least):

Your responsibilities will entail creating and nurturing an open source and research community around the Reporter’s Lab; working with journalists using tools and techniques created or modified by the Lab; building challenge libraries and problem sets; and contributing to the Reporter’s Lab blog and its Test Kitchen reviews.

It sounds complicated, but the end goal isn’t: We want to help people spend less time digging through public records and more time reporting on the important information locked away inside of them. If we do our job right, it will mean more valuable journalism, more accountable government and a more well-informed public.

This could be big. Certainly for journalism, but also for a journalism convert who found a passion for this business while wasting away in an electrical engineering curriculum. It’s a chance for me to use that background, that way of thinking, to act as an interpreter between reporters and software/application developers, while building a network of both along the way.

I’m incredibly excited. But I’m also sad to leave a group of student journalists who have taught me more over the course of a year-and-a-half than I ever thought possible — and certainly more than I could ever hope to teach them as an adviser. The staff members of the Technician, Agromeck, Nubian Message, WKNC, Windhover and Wolf TV have seen some big changes over the last few months. But these men and women are talented and passionate, and I’m confident they’ll continue to use their publications to provide strong coverage of their community as forums for student expression — just as they’ve done in one form or another since 1903.

I want to thank them for making the last year-and-a-half great. I want to thank my wife for her love, support and willingness to put up with four-plus years of completely opposite work schedules. I also want to thank Sarah and her colleagues at Duke for giving me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

This will certainly be a new adventure, and I’m glad I was able to answer the call.

Want more info on Reporter’s Lab? Keep up with the blog or connect with me via Twitter.