an itch I really, really,
really want to scratch.”
Dan Sinker heads up the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project.
He was the founding editor of the influential underground culture magazine Punk Planet and is now a self-taught jour-nalist, publisher, and coder. He has no advanced degree, but worked full-time as a professor at Columbia College. Dan authored the popular @MayorEmanuel Twitter account, now collected as a book published by Scribner in 2011. He created an election tracker called the Chicago Mayoral Scorecard, and the mobile storytelling project CellStories.
I heard from many people that they learned the most by doing projects they loved and learning on the fly, rather than by going to class. Dan has approached learning with this DIY spirit his whole life. Here he describes his path to becoming a journalist, editor, and publisher, all of which he learned from publishing a magazine he loved.
There’s a subtle but important point in Dan’s story — that skills you learn in one field often become useful in an entirely different pursuit. I loved hearing about the chaotic and exciting process Dan goes through to learn new things, in this case learning what he needed to know to launch CellStories.
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I spent 13 years running Punk Planet and a larger publishing company called Independence Day Media. I started Punk Planet when I was 19 years old, half-way through college. I was going to the Art Institute of Chicago to study video art. I did finish college, although I almost didn’t because I was really involved in the magazine. Like all punk scenes back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, every- one was so young. The big local bands were comprised of 17-year-olds. Record label people were probably a little younger than that, and the people doing the zines were even younger than that. It embodied everything about DIY ethics that I love: Nobody checking credentials, nobody asking if you have any real skills to do the things that you say you’re going to do, and instead really empow- ering people to do those things.
Moving back and forth from that scene to art school was deeply alienating, because they were about as opposite as you could get. In school, there were a lot of people talking about their ideas and then waiting for some sort of validation before they’d do anything. I didn’t feel like I had a lot of peers in school because I was the one actually making things happen. I ended up on the internet all the time and on message boards, where I found people who were involved in their own punk scene and ended up building a little bit of a virtual community. Punk Planet magazine grew out of that. So, I was paying money for an education, but at the same time, really feeling like most of the education I was getting was actually happening on nights and weekends. That’s when I was with this group of people and none of us knew what we were doing, but we began to figure out how to run a magazine and how to make something like that happen. I thought about drop-ping out of school a number of times, but I had gotten far enough down the road on my degree that I just felt like I needed to see the thing through. In my last year of college half of my classes were independent study so I could work on Punk Planet. That was probably the best use of tuition money.
The first couple of years of Punk Planet, it was a terrible magazine. Part of that was because nobody involved knew how to run a magazine. One of the skills we needed to learn was what an editor does. At some point I realized that everything that I had learned about editing video actually applied to editing anything. I can remember that moment very well when I thought, wait a sec-ond, I do know how to do this. I just knew how to do it in a totally different way.
So I applied what I knew about video to stories in the magazine, and suddenly the magazine transformed. So, that is the one thing that I will credit to my col-lege education. I’ve barely touched a video camera since I graduated, but it absolutely taught me how to be an editor.
The magazine folded in 2007, and I ended up at Stanford University for a year as a Knight Fellow, which is a fellowship program for mid-career journalists. To me the fact that I got this fellowship based on Punk Planet was hilarious. It was probably about five months before the end of the magazine and I was looking for alternative funding. I actually typed “journalism grants” into Google, and the Knight Foundation popped up on the top and in poking around their site, I ended up on the Knight Fellowship page. I thought there was no way that would happen.
It was something for Pulitzer winners and very traditional journalists. But my wife and my friends said, why not? It turned out they were in the middle of re-thinking their process, and I was one of a few outsiders they brought in as guinea pigs to try a different approach. It was an incredibly lucky thing, to have applied right at that time. I got to just be in a place and have open access to whatever I wanted to do. I mainly looked into what the influence of mobile technology was going to be on culture. But, I’ve joked many times that if that hadn’t happened I probably would have ended up working at Arby’s. Instead, after the fellowship, I taught digital tools and strategy to journalists at Columbia College in Chicago. I did that for three years as a full-time faculty member.
Besides publishing Punk Planet, the best example of something I learned totally outside of being a student is when I built CellStories.net, which was a cell phone literary magazine that published one story every day and delivered it to your phone. It ran from September 2009 to the end of 2010. Building and running it encompassed tons of different types of learning. It was built from scratch in a framework I taught myself (Ruby on Rails). I developed it around a lot of different theories and ideas on mobile content delivery and consumption.
I tend to not learn well from external pressure. All my pressure comes from within: from hearing about something and wanting to dive further into it, or (most of the time) from having an itch I really, really, really want to scratch. In the case of CellStories it was a combination of the two. I really wanted to learn a robust framework for dynamic web creation for a multitude of reasons, and I was super interested in mobile phones and wanted to learn all I could about them. This started back in the fall of 2007, so in the baby steps era of iPhones.
To learn all that, basically I did what I always do. I start running at 100 MPh in one direction, get pretty far and realize I’m in the wrong place, turn around and run 100 MPh in another direction. It’s not a great way to learn quickly, but it really does give me a very wide understanding of a problem. Even though backtracking can be really frustrating, I tend to come out with a breadth I wouldn’t have if I was a little more methodical about it. And, generally, that
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breadth becomes helpful eventually. Mostly. To keep everything straight, I live and die by Moleskine notebooks. I fill them with notes, ideas, sketches, names, etc. I tend to have three or so going at any time, one for specific projects, one simply labeled “Ideas,” and one or two for classes.
Learning outside school is unimaginable to me without engaging with other people. And lonely. As co-working spaces become more popular, I keep wish-ing someone would come out with a co-learnwish-ing space. It’s not about a desire for a more structured environment. Just people around to be able to bounce ideas off of, to help you think things through. When I’m looking for people to talk to and learn from, I just hit people up. If I wanted to talk to someone who was doing something interesting in Africa, say — like the people who made the crisis reporting platform Ushahidi — I’d just drop them a line. It is pretty incredible how responsive people are in answering and engaging. I’ve found that, by and large, people who are passionate about the things that they do are very happy to engage with other people that are passionate about what they do.
There’s always this great moment when you really figure out that you’ve actually learned something, because you suddenly realize that you’re doing things that you couldn’t do before. Like, for instance, I’ve been hitting my head against the wall with some JSON-related stuff lately. And suddenly, the other day, without even being at a computer, I figured it out. In my head. And it was so obvious! But it felt great. Those moments keep coming. I had been doing CellStories for about a year and I realized: Wow, I know this stuff now. And then my immediate response was: NOW WhAT?!
Dan Sinker’s website is sinker.tumblr.com
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