Subject: Getting Back In Touch

Erica:

Bassey and I decided to write personal essays to kick off our new series of posts. Little postcards to you all before we get down to business. 

For those who don't know, Bassey and I accidentally live blocks from each other. We live just south of where the L train, G train and BQE intersect. It’s the aorta of Williamsburg; a throughway for humans, delivery workers and cement trucks. 

The corners of the intersection are woefully underdeveloped. There’s an ok bar that serves Chicago style hot dogs and gimlets on tap, a liquor store so bad that I suspect it’s a front, a park that’s fallen into disrepair and — until one week ago — a bankrupt diner. 

The diner is back though! It’s the biggest local news story of the season. It reopened with a TexMex theme, a female owner and a reservation backlog not often seen at establishments that serve home fries. Are diners the new tasting menus? Are enchiladas the new Greek omelets? Is it better to have a mediocre diner that is available to the community than an exclusive diner that isn’t? 

We’ll let you know next month when we manage to get a table. 

I’ve been paying attention to comeback stories recently because I now work for Yahoo. Remember Yahoo? It’s the old, purple internet company that built a directory of the nascent Internet. I still have my old Yahoo email account that I will not share with you all because the name is embarrassing, but I will divulge that it includes the word “girl” spelled with a ‘u’. 

Yahoo was beat up by the current tech Olympians and was sold to Verizon in 2016. Verizon acquired a bunch of media companies and spun off a collection of them to a private equity firm in 2021. I work at the privately held version of Yahoo, now officially headquartered in New York City. And — you heard it here first — it’s cool again. 

A friend recently texted me this photograph alongside a series of question marks. Do I understand why my company commissioned a mural of a Yoo-Hoo chocolate milk bottle with the Yahoo logo in Williamsburg? No. But does it seem like a thing a cool company would do? Absolutely. 

I run a machine learning engineering team within Yahoo News that works on problems like personalized content recommendation and content understanding. It’s an exciting space in the age of AI and I have a great team I’m working alongside. 

In the last eight months I’ve realized that (1) I like working for the underdog and (2) I like working on consumer products. Consumers can be fickle and crave the next small content dopamine hit, even if it makes them unhappy. But they also love reading about how to be happy. The contradiction is something I relate to: How might we stay informed and also stay happy? A topic for a future post.

Bassey:

As many of you have guessed (hi, Lucas!) we’ve been keeping ourselves a bit too busy lately.

As for me, I’ve been consulting! Career-wise, over the last bunch of months, I’ve found myself in an interesting place. I had a desire to get back to working on news full time, but I’ve found myself a bit shut out from my first true love – journalism. 

As my knowledge has grown over the years, I’ve become more interested in local news and the kinds of strategies that might make it a more healthy competitor for eyeballs here in the algorithmic era of media. 

But, mostly, I hear the same thing from just about everywhere: This looks great and all, but we are going to hire someone who spent a lot of time running traditional news desks instead of… well, whatever confusing things you do. Which, honestly, is fair. I swerved my career away from the traditional journalism route because during my career at The New York Times, I learned that I could have a much greater impact by taking a step back from daily news. Instead, I worked to build robust systems that draw people closer to the craft of journalism. 

That work is painstaking and strange. You push for months against a brick wall, and then everything happens all at once. Working on emerging strategy in media is something of a clinic in methodically updating ambitious plans to prepare for a future that often feels impossible. So, imagine me saying that in a job interview and someone else saying: I edited 1,000 pieces, we won these awards and I wrote these stories that led to this outcome… Yeah, there’s a good reason I’m frozen out right now! 

That said, I can’t complain too much about consulting. My projects give me the opportunity to conduct a wide range of research on emerging editorial technology and AI adjacent content strategies. It's been fascinating to learn that some of the earliest adopters with the biggest plans in these spaces now find themselves nursing bloated new AI features that add marginal value, while the players just getting started now are finding smart, targeted use cases that focus on the greatest strength of LLMs: efficient summarization and categorization. 

The good news for MoP is that I’m better positioned to share useful thoughts with folks at the nexus of tech and media than I’ve ever been.

The bad news for me is that hustling from client to client just isn’t really my thing, it turns out. I prefer to not worry about external-to-work practicalities such as: When am I actually going to get paid? 

I’d much rather focus on solving problems in both their short and long term iterations. That said, there are legions of ultra-talented editors out there who are looking for work, which is leading me more toward working exclusively in tech, and away from media. 

Thankfully, I’ve recently become transfixed with breakthrough product problem solving at tech orgs.

But still, looking back on it, It's been a strange ride: I’ve been boxed into a highly lucrative, growing field and I’m having a ton of career and product success doing it. But what I wanted more than anything was to make a decent living helping build up a news practice that can use the skills I’ve gained – but I just couldn’t find a way there. Boo-hoo for me, right? 

Definitely not, actually. I’m starting a very cool new tech job in a couple of weeks. More on that later!