Not a Typical Journalist

My colleagues gave me several nicknames.

Dev-journalist (developer + journalist), design-journalist (designer + journalist), PD-journalist (PD + journalist), data-journalist (data analyst + 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: reporting chops, exclusives, sources, the ability to make deadlines. There was a time I fit that picture — covering the police beat on the social desk, living with my phone in hand waiting for the right moment to break a story. That life existed.

But even then, I was thinking about other things.

In 2011, I created a Twitter account called "Underliner." The idea was to post only sentences worth underlining from books I was reading — nothing else. No particular reason. It just seemed like fun. A few years later, services like "Bookend" emerged. 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 beginning to be known. The page did well. "Hey, was that you who made it?" — I heard that quite a few times afterward.

I started an R study group at the company — a group to study data analysis together. Journalists learning R drew some skeptical looks. My reaction: what's it to you?

It's not common for a journalist to walk into the editor's office with a proposal.

I did occasionally. "What if we tried something like this?" That's how I ended up involved with FactPL, and then the newslab.

When we were building FactPL, I wasn't just someone writing articles. I designed the newsletter format, laid out homepage wireframes myself, analyzed subscriber data to understand which kinds of content drove open rates. I proposed a StoryPoll — an integrated survey-and-content format — and actually ran it. Readers responded. I made responsive racing charts tracing the growth histories of major tech companies. When Clubhouse blew up, I opened a room on creator economy and talked directly with readers.

"There he goes again with something new." Something my colleagues said often. And they were right.

I showed up at early-stage Publy and pitched a co-production: "Presidential Election User's Manual." Business plans for bespoke, an economics outlet targeting people in their 30s and 40s, and Know/edge, a personalization service designed to counteract algorithmic filter bubbles — those proposals are still in some file somewhere. None were actually built. But those thoughts accumulated, and I believe they eventually turned into things like FactPL.

Looking back, there's one consistent thread.

Community.

Underliner was built because reading alone and showing no one felt like waste. That became a Twitter gathering with over 1,000 followers — a Google Doc where we collected good sentences together, held votes, and organized offline meetups. In retrospect, quite a serious community — but at the time I just did it because it was fun.

The Bitcoin page was similar. Early on, it was people gathering to share information. Later, people were actually buying and selling. Trade information was passing through the page. By 2017 standards — before Bitcoin was widely known — that was real activity.

In 2018, when I was on the data journalism team and invited readers to a meetup, the logic was the same: I was tired of putting out articles and having it end there. I wanted to hear reactions directly.

I think I kept hitting the limit of one-way content delivery. I report alone, write alone, file to a portal alone. See if it worked through numbers. But behind those numbers are people.

There's one more thread.

I once rented a house in Manwon-dong, renovated it, and ran it as a guesthouse. The conversations I had there with the people I met 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 going to be a furniture designer." (It didn't happen.)

I kept coming back to lifestyle. I think the more precise statement is: I was more interested in whether articles actually reached into someone's life than in writing the articles themselves. 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 what a journalist is.

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.