Who I am
I’m Brian Boyer, a programmer coaxed by a scholarship into studying journalism at Medill. Extra special thanks to Rich Gordon and the Knight Foundation for giving me this opportunity!
Want more? Find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Monogram, and Facebook.
Why I’m here
A bit on BoingBoing caught my eye last May.
Someone was hunting for programmers to mold into journalists.
I was feeling malleable, and school had been on my mind for a while — I love technology, but making software for businesses sucked. Law and public policy were on my short list, but if Northwestern wanted to write the checks, journalism was worth a look.
So, I googled it.
I found out that journalism has a mission: to inform the people so that they may better self govern. Lawyering and politicking are top-down affairs — journalists work from the bottom up. They help people solve their own problems.
They enable democracy.
That was something I could get behind. It was an easy choice: I jumped ship from the lucrative world of software development, and dove head first into a tumultuous new profession characterized by layoffs, buyouts, and bleeding bottom lines.
I reckoned if the source of the tumult was technology, then journalism just needed more nerds. This blog is where I’m sorting out what it is that I can do.
I hope I can help.
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