Call it a pivot
It's been two years since Demo Day for my class of Tow-Knight Fellows at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. My pitch then: A data news service for hyperlocal digital news sites and weekly papers. I landed no sales in the summer following that semester of study in entrepreneurial journalism. In the fall I rejoined Gannett, this time at its Asbury Park Design Studio. So was I out of the entrepreneurial game? Not entirely, even if I hadn't cracked the starting lineup. During the Tow-Knight semester, I heard from a former newsroom colleague who is now with a small financial publishing house. The publisher had lost a key staffer who was expert in writing code, and my colleague thought I could help fill the gap. We never quite made the right connection that spring. But more than a year later, I again approached the publisher, offering to solve work flow problems on a freelance basis. Yes, they had just such a task, and over a few months I was able to streamline the shop's print-to-web process for filing prospectus content to the SEC's Edgar system. Before our collaboration, an experienced staffer had needed to open each prospectus in a commercial Windows program, resave in a particular way, do some minor editing and save again. Now, a script converts a folder of documents at once and adds the editing tweaks. The resulting software mostly uses Python, but the innermost layer is in a niche language that I learned for the occasion. So this was entrepreneurial, in that I pitched my wares and eventually pocketed a check. But it was not the public-service project I had pitched at CUNY. And I did not think of it as data journalism -- until I was about to wrap things up. The finished product was to be delivered on a flash drive, so I went shopping for a fresh one. The store clerk asked me if I wanted a drive capable of encryption. No need, I was able to tell him, this is turning something into a public record. So yes, data journalism of a sort. Happy for the chance to chip in.
