Not a Typical Journalist
Dev-journalist, design-journalist, PD-journalist, data-journalist. Colleagues gave me these nicknames. I kept hearing I didn't seem like a journalist — and at some point that stopped sounding like an insult.
My colleagues gave me several nicknames.
Dev-journalist (developer + journalist), design-journalist, PD-journalist, data-journalist.
I kept hearing that I didn't seem like a journalist, and at some point that stopped bothering me.
When people hear you've been a journalist for over ten years, they have a picture. Breaking news, exclusives, sources, deadline endurance. I had that chapter — covering courts and police in the social desk, at one point living by my phone waiting for the right moment to break a story. That life existed.
But even then, I was thinking about other things.
In 2011 I made a Twitter account called "Underliner." The concept: only post sentences worth underlining from books. No explanation, just the sentences. No particular reason — it just seemed interesting. A few years later, services like "Bookend" appeared. I'd already been doing it; I just didn't know it was an idea.
In 2017 I made a Facebook page called "Bitcoin News." Bitcoin was just starting to be known. The page did well. I heard "hey, was that you?" quite a few times afterward.
I started an R study group inside the company. We'd study data analysis together. "Why are journalists learning R?" was the look I got. I thought: what's it to you?
It wasn't common for a journalist to walk into the editor's office with a business proposal.
I did that occasionally. "What if we tried something like this?" That's how I got involved with FactPL, with the newslab.
When we were building FactPL, I wasn't just someone writing articles. I designed the newsletter format, laid out the homepage wireframes myself, analyzed subscriber data to understand which content types drove open rates. I proposed a StoryPoll — an integrated survey-plus-content format — and ran it. Readers responded. I made responsive racing chart videos of IT company growth histories. When Clubhouse blew up, I opened a creator economy room and talked directly with readers.
"There he goes again with something new." Something colleagues said often. They were right.
I showed up at early Publy and pitched a "Presidential Election User's Manual" collaboration. The bespoke 3040 economics media, the Know/edge algorithm-filter-fighting personalization service — those proposals are still in files somewhere. None were actually built. But those ideas accumulated and eventually became things like FactPL.
One thing is consistent looking back.
Community.
Underliner was built because reading alone and not showing anyone felt like waste. That became a Twitter gathering that exceeded 1,000 followers — a Google Doc where we'd collect and vote on good sentences, with offline meetups. In retrospect, quite a serious community, though at the time I just did it because it was fun.
The Bitcoin page was similar. Early on, people gathering to share information. Later, actual buyers emerging. Trades being arranged in the page. By 2017 standards — before Bitcoin was widely known — that was real.
When I was on the data journalism team in 2018 and invited readers to an event, same logic: I was tired of putting out articles and having it end there. I wanted to hear the reactions directly.
I think I kept hitting the limit of unilateral content delivery. I report alone, write alone, file to a portal alone. See whether it worked in numbers. But behind those numbers are people.
There's one more story.
I once rented and renovated a house in Manwon-dong and ran it as a guesthouse. The conversations I had with people I met there became a column called "Manwon-dong Silk Stocking." I made YouTube interviews with an independent bookshop owner and a carpentry studio owner, got deep into woodworking, and went around declaring "if I quit journalism I'm becoming a furniture designer." (It didn't happen.)
I kept having this interest in lifestyle. I think the more precise version is: I was more interested in whether articles reached into someone's life than in writing the articles. Content connected to living. Somewhere where content and life intersected. That's something I never found inside the newsroom.
There's a fixed image of a journalist.
I kept departing from it. That's why I kept hearing I didn't seem like a journalist, and eventually why I ended up somewhere else.
But looking back now — being a journalist who didn't seem like a journalist was probably just who I was.