Dispatch #4

Most people I know in higher education are (rightfully!) considering what is most valuable to teach today’s students. Purely vocational training focuses too much on market trends and immediate job openings, but not enough on critical thinking and personal voice, which are more useful in the long run (professionally and personally). On the other hand, curriculum that veers too philosophical or fine artsy can feel overwhelming and abstract to students that aren’t comfortable with ambiguity.

Studying design and writing offer a nice mix of both approaches as they encourage finding links between different disciplines and sounding confident in your own stance. They require curiosity, translation, and research which transition into a variety of careers, even if it isn’t a 1:1 career path. This week’s guest, Jane Seidel, inspired our class by sharing how some of these traits play out in her role as Head of Audience & Analytics at Rest of World.

I was thrilled to have Jane join us, as Rest of World is a publication I’ve long admired for their mix of tech reporting and cultural features (like the Digital Divinity series!) outside of Silicon Valley. Their audience seems specific, too, since they cover regions outside of the West but it’s written for mostly Western tech professionals.

Jane shared a little about how her line of work has changed over time. Audience strategy used to mean getting clicks; now it’s about meeting people where they are, building relationships with them, and getting them to come back.

On a practical level, she showed us how messy data is. It lives in places including: Google analytics, social shares, traffic, policy changes that are documented by reporters on custom spreadsheets, just to name a few. Much of her work involves cleaning, synthesizing, and asking better questions of that data. AI can assist with calculations, but the insight comes from framing the right comparisons and understanding who the work is for which comes through data, observation, and interviews.

Another change is that content has moved away from being formulaic and can be platform specific. Jane shared a recent story about a community in Chile that became a "human powered AI" that Rest of World published only on Instagram, where it performed well because it was a human impact story that was highly visual.

Jane ended her talk with a sentiment for her line of work, where if you're trying to talk to as many people as possible, it likely isn’t as effective as narrowing the scope. She left us with a few questions:

Who is this for?
Why would they care?
Where will they see it / how will I find them?
What will they do next?
How will they return to it?

Great questions for students in the humanities looking to distribute their work publicly. Thank you Jane!