I’m very excited to announce that I’m now working with the local team on medium- and long-term journalism and technology projects. I’ll also be diving into big breaking stories when those arise.
This new role blends project management and hands-on work (e.g. continuing to put those improved code skills to use!). I’ll be collaborating with editors, reporters and others across the newsroom, including the developer team. Karaoke is not an official responsibility, but we’ll see how that plays out.
Here’s the announcement:
We’re pleased to announce that Greg Linch is Local’s new innovations editor. He joins the staff after working for six months with newsroom developers building web tools for reporters, editors and producers. Greg was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper at the University of Miami with a focus on traditional writing and reporting until he began dabbling with coding during his junior year. By the time he graduated, he’d become an entrepreneur, co-founding a college media start-up, and gravitated to another start-up in Loudoun County called Publish2. He joined the Post in 2010 as a producer for Health & Science before moving on to Politics, briefly, and then the Foreign Desk.
We’re confident that Greg’s training in journalism and his burgeoning technical skills will enable him to help reporters and editors find new and expansive ways to tell stories, present data, hold public agencies accountable and find new audiences on the web and on mobile devices. He can speak multiple newsroom languages, he understands what’s possible across digital media, and he’s passionate about working closely with reporters and editors. He previously worked on the Zero Day series with Bob O’Harrow, who says Greg is “totally smart, really collegial and makes stuff happen.” In his copious spare time, Greg has also served as an adjunct instructor for Northwestern’s Medill National Security Journalism Initiative for the past two fall quarters. This year, he begins a two-year term on the Online News Association’s board of directors. Please join us in congratulating him on his important new assignment.
As I mentioned before, I’m running for the ONA board (read more about all of the candidates). All of the candidates will discuss their visions for the organization and answer questions at Decision 2013: The Lightning Round session. If we’ve never met before, please say hi at the conference. I’d also be glad to answer any questions about my thoughts for ONA — ask away in the comments below!
Measuring your audience is one thing. Measuring your impact as a journalist is definitely another. Modern technology enables better quantitative and analytical tools, conceivably offering better ways to evaluate the results of journalism. But it’s possible to devise a way to more concretely — albeit still imperfectly — define what impact means. We could borrow from, use, adapt or learn from science, baseball, non-profits, social entrepreneurship, even car manufacturer websites and pharmaceutical drug trials.
I have a few more interesting examples, so be sure to join us for this conversation!
Finally — and perhaps the most important part of all this! — is that karaoke is returning this year! RSVP here.
P.S. What must I do/see in San Francisco after the conference? I’ll be around on Sunday and Monday before going to Seattle for a couple days and then Portland. Recommendations for those cities are also welcome!
I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be starting a new role here at The Washington Post, news about which was just sent to the newsroom:
“We are excited to announce that Greg Linch will be moving into a new hybrid technology / newsroom role starting June 1. Since coming to the Post in December 2010, he has desk-pedaled his way across a few sections.
Greg began by producing for the health, science and environment team. Those months rekindled a childhood interest by feeding and growing his natural curiosity about the world. He then put both halves of his journalism-political science double major to use during a short stint with the politics team before starting an exciting year working with the foreign and national security desks.
All the while he’s been improving his technical knowledge with the ultimate goal of doing better journalism, such as creating a few handy tools and helping to make some production tasks more efficient. That’s no surprise, of course, considering the two start-ups he previously worked on — one for college media when he was at the University of Miami and one that made tools for newsrooms before he joined the Post.
At the Post we have section producers who primarily work in a CMS and engineers who build news applications, but nothing in between. Greg will pioneer an experimental role to straddle web production and web development – a special projects and applications producer position that will focus on more technical and medium to long-term projects and solutions.
We see Greg as a person who can look beyond standard journalism forms to help develop technology that pushes the boundaries of storytelling alongside the newsroom. He will partner with editors and technologists to
conceive and create tools that engage users with our journalism; current examples of apps in development include a polling interface and our new live blogging platform. He will work with the entire newsroom, from
producers to reporters to designers to find places where development can come together to create new technology that serves our users and our journalism.
Greg will spend the first 3 – 6 months of this new role training exclusively with engineers: honing his development skills. After he completes this initial embedding in web development, he’ll be working in
the newsroom through Cory Haik and be deployed on projects within news and alongside the embedded engineering group run by Washington Post Chief Architect Greg Franczyk.”
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.
