OUR ALUMNI
Pennycook Connects Reporters, Coders at NPR BY JACK FITZPATRICK Jeremy Pennycook wanted more than lectures from his college experience. When deciding on a graduate school, he looked for one that would give him a practical overview of the media industry and prepare him to innovate in a changing business. That brought him to the Cronkite School. After graduating with a master’s degree in fall 2009, Pennycook was hired as NPR’s mobile operations manager, helping chart NPR Mobile’s direction and acting as a translator of sorts between reporters and coders. His responsibilities include NPR’s apps and websites for Android devices, iPad and tablet computers and Google Chrome. “What really makes me good at my job is the ability to talk to an editorial person and understand their concerns and sort of be able to relay that information and communicate that to a developer who speaks basically a different language, all the while being able to prioritize what’s important in a big-picture strategy sense,” he said. Pennycook said it was exhilarating to land a job with a major media company and even more exciting to help plan strategy for a leader in the mobile space. “Some of our products handle over a million people a month, and that’s pretty cool to think about,” he said. The job requires a versatile skill set, which Pennycook developed at Cronkite. He said his experience at the school gave him “a sense of total journalism,” enabling him to play any journalistic role necessary, just as an athlete in team sports should be able to play any position. “Rather than these niche, specialized jobs, it’s really giving you a Swiss Army knife full of skills with the bigpicture knowledge about the industry as a whole and how the media landscape has changed,” he said. While at Cronkite, Pennycook immersed himself in all aspects of multimedia, participating as a video producer in the Carnegie-Knight News21 Initiative, as an innovator in the New Media Innovation Lab 94
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and as a student developer in the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. The latter two programs bring together students with different focuses and majors, offering the chance to translate ideas from opposing viewpoints and understand the intersection between journalism and business development. In the Cronkite School’s Knight Center, which has students creating their own innovative digital media projects, Pennycook co-developed a news platform akin to the personalized Internet radio service Pandora. The project’s goal was to suggest news based on the characteristics of other articles users have found helpful. “We built that as a product from scratch, and that has definitely helped me not only understand the media landscape more but to articulate it better and deal with the ambiguity that one has to deal with in that space,” he said. Pennycook also worked for the NMIL in fall 2009 and participated for class credit the following semester. The lab functions as a research and development agency for media companies, employing students from different disciplines to research new applications and products. He worked with 11G, Gannett Co.’s innovation team, on a mobile social networking application for The Arizona Republic and on improving the structure of the comments section of the newspaper’s website. Retha Hill, NMIL’s director and former vice president of content for BET Interactive, said the experience of working with professionals prepares students like Pennycook for careers and gives them valuable contacts. “We’re hired by news companies and information companies to do projects, so you’re working with and interfacing with executives from some of these companies,” Hill said. “It could be the publisher; it could be the vice president of interactive; it could be the vice president of news; it could be the CEO of a company.” Pennycook said the hands-on experience he obtained at the Cronkite School prepared him to segue immediately into
Photo by Kathie Miller
“Rather than these niche, specialized jobs, [the school’s] really giving you a Swiss Army knife full of skills.” — Jeremy Pennycook, Cronkite alumnus
a leadership position. In his current role, he represents NPR at speaking engagements, such as appearances at the prestigious O’Reilly Media’s Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore. Pennycook also credits the school for teaching him how to balance the business aspects of digital media development with journalistic ethics. “I really immersed myself in the media landscape and whatever that meant, whether it was producing content, coming up with new products or sort of being reflective about how the industry was doing and what the business models of the future might be,” he said. Despite the business and technical requirements of his job, Pennycook said he still enjoys creating content. He writes occasionally for NPR’s “All Tech Considered” blog and has had one post featured on the home page of NPR.org. “My ultimate goal for myself is to try and show that one can be capable of doing both — what I call the product of business development side as well as the production side,” he said. o