I’m starting a new job today as an Enterprise Growth Engineer on the WordPress VIP team at Automattic.
I’m a little bit excited.
If you know me at all, you know that no matter the title, my job in news has always been to evangelize for new technology to serve journalism. As a reporter, an editor, a product manager, a team leader — I’ve tried to give journalists the tools and training they need to successfully reach (and move! and impact!) their readers, while growing their audience and building sustainable models for the future.
WordPress has often been a part of that equation for me. I suppose my first of many CMS migrations was the move of my own blog to WordPress from Blogspot, even if it was only a few weeks after I started writing here. Later came a WordPress theme for the blogs at what was then Inside Bay Area (in the 19th iteration since, it’s currently the East Bay Times but has somehow maintained the stories I wrote as an intern in 2006), then a move of all the Santa Cruz Sentinel’s blogs from pMachine (an early Expression Engine product IIRC) to WordPress, plus a couple Joomla (and Mambo?) verticals, too. I used WordPress as a platform for podcasting, for daily video newscasts, for blogs, naturally, and even once drafted plans for a university journalism department website, among other non-news odds and ends.
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When I left corporate media for the nonprofit news world in 2015, it felt like I was starting a tour of duty. I had heard the same phrase used by people taking government tech work at places like 18F, and it fit the way I felt at the time. Would I stay in the nonprofit world for good? What would I learn, and how would I use it in the future? Would I look for another nonprofit role when the first one ran its course?
In the end, this move is personal. I decided to look for a role at an organization that was remote-first. I wanted to try something new, outside my usual routine of journalism product management (although you should totally keep doing that, please), and I wanted to be in a position where I could focus on The Work for a while, rather than The Work About The Work, although it will always interest me, too.
So. If you hate your CMS, hit me up. And. AND! If you lovvvvvve your CMS, I want to hear all about that, too.
Oh, and, of course, Automattic is hiring.
Ryan Sholin 