Interviews, New Media, Newspaper News - Monday, July 27, 2009 18:33 - 3 Comments

Interview With NYC.is Founder Susannah Vila

After receiving the following email Tip, I approached NYC.is founder Susannah Vila for an interview.

“…a friend of mine who’s a grad student at Columbia University launched a kind of localized New York City version of Digg. Rather than using the editor curator approach — like Huffington Post — all the users of the site are New Yorkers that submit NYC-related stories and vote up and down on them to get them to the front page. The site also allows users to publish their own blog posts into the news stream, so it’s also becoming a place for community journalism:

http://nyc.is/

Anyway, I thought this was neat and interesting because this isn’t your typical VC-funded start-up, but rather a grad school student who’s working on all this stuff from scratch. And I think it’s a cool approach to more localized news. I thought you and your readers might find it interesting.

Thanks for the Tip!  Keep them coming.  The following interview took place in the form of an email Q&A between Susannah Vila and metaprinter founder Robert Ivan.  Enjoy!

RI- Are you studying journalism at Columbia?
SV- I study political science and public policy.

RI- What got you interested in journalism?
SV- I became interested in how people get the information that allows them to be active citizens.  I wanted to be a journalist because I wanted to inform and engage people.  I want to work towards engaging more people with their government and their communities.  I will probably be doing many different types of things with that goal in mind.

RI- Are students still clamoring to get jobs with traditional media outlets?…or is there something new to reach for?
SV- I think it depends on the student, and on the j school they came out of.  CUNY and Medill are doing great things to foster innovation and an entrepreneurial attitudes. But while there are indeed many exciting new prospects for journalism in play right now, they do not offer a steady paycheck, so the understandable attitude among a lot of people my age is that they should do whatever they can do to get a full time job.

RI- What do you think of Jose Antonio Vargas leaving the Washington Post?
SV- I do think that it, at least to some extent, reflects larger trends in journalism. HuffPo is constantly innovating and adding new features; it mixes the work of paid, professional bloggers and reporters with unpaid and, not necessarily formally trained, ones.  They’re growing while the Washington Post shrinks.  And it’s because of this the Vargas will be able to start his own thing from scratch, which is always exciting. Continue…