Jennifer Strong, Executive Editor and Host of SHIFT Podcast

In this edition of the Pressing Matters podcast, host Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers Practice, speaks with Jennifer Strong, a seasoned podcaster who began her radio career at 12 in Tennessee. Jennifer's extensive experience includes work with NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and MIT Tech Review. Now at Shift, she produces and hosts podcasts that delve into AI and other emerging technologies, addressing their global impact and the challenges they present. In this episode, we explore her deep coverage of AI and discuss how she’s working to ensure these technologies make a positive difference in the world.

Transcript

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Dave Reddy (00:00):

Jennifer Strong doesn't waste time. The longtime podcaster got her first radio announcer job at the age of 12 at her local station in Tennessee. In college she did internships in Brazil, in New York, and even worked at NPR and of course performed odd jobs in whatever spare time she could make in order to make some money. As a freelancer working part-time, because she was raising three kids, she still managed to work for NPR, the Wall Street Journal and other titles, the Wall Street Journal's, future of Everything podcast. Then was her MIT Tech Review's Trust in Machines. We trust her too. Now at Shift when she isn't producing, hosting or editing a podcast on AI or another emerging technology, you might find her in Rwanda helping to figure out how AI can ID black faces as well as it IDs white ones or as she was the day we recorded this in New York City, moderating a panel while sitting in a makeshift studio in Times Square.

Jennifer managed to join us to discuss AI, both her coverage of it, and now she's making sure it changes the world in the right way. Her short stint as a classical music DJ and her Olympic level work ethic for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B Tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers Practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's, top 200 media and influencers, including Jennifer Strong. Here's my chat with Jennifer. Enjoy. Jennifer, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. As a podcaster yourself, I hope we live up to your expectations.

Jennifer Strong (01:48):

Oh, this is fun. Thank you for having me.

Dave Reddy (01:51):

So let's hop right into it. So you grew up in Tennessee, Memphis, Nashville, somewhere else?

Jennifer Strong (01:57):

Somewhere else. I was an army brat, so I actually lived all over the place, but we did settle in Tennessee and I have grandmothers and my mother are still there now, middle of nowhere. Grew up in the mountains,

Dave Reddy (02:06):

So you'd think I'd know better because I'm an east coaster, but I actually never managed to get to Tennessee yet. Like the Appalachian Mountains or are there different mountains in Tennessee?

Jennifer Strong (02:15):

Yeah, so we're about an hour from Chattanooga and Knoxville or so a hundred and something miles to Nashville, Cumberland Mountains.

Dave Reddy (02:24):

Okay, great. You are the second mounting dwelling person in a row that we've had on the show. So there, there's a theme here going on. What did mom and dad do in the Cumberland Mountains?

Jennifer Strong (02:35):

Well, my dad was a proud military veteran and he's a respiratory therapist, also a mechanic too. So he did a number of things. Mom took care of us kids and then she actually moved in with me for a time when I was in grad school and she went to undergrad in Washington dc

Dave Reddy (02:52):

No kidding. What did she study?

Jennifer Strong (02:54):

Okay, you're not going to wait for this. She studied Middle East studies. She flipped a quarter after all the kids were gone. She loved, she thought that both Arabic and Italian, there were beautiful languages, so she flipped a quarter. It landed on Arabic. So first she came up to DC to learn to speak Arabic, which she did, and this is before I was 20 something years ago, I guess. At any rate. Then from there she went on and she almost passed the foreign service exam and almost went to work for the State Department, but instead went back to Tennessee to take care of my grandparents.

Dave Reddy (03:28):

Wow, that is a pretty cool little sidebar there.

Jennifer Strong (03:31):

Yeah, it was not expected probably.

Dave Reddy (03:35):

So Army brat, I'm guessing your dad was not the DJ on the base

Jennifer Strong (03:42):

Radio,

Dave Reddy (03:44):

But I saw that you were announcing at a radio station in Crossville, Tennessee, which I presume was your hometown or near your hometown for several years before you went to college. So were you doing this as a high schooler?

Jennifer Strong (03:56):

I was doing this as a middle schooler. I was 12 years old when I started in radio. I don't know, I just listened to a lot of radio and they for felt like weeks, months, I don't know a long time, kept saying, call this number. We need people to work here. And so I eventually called the number, made an appointment, told my parents I needed to be dropped off somewhere. Not sure they believed me, but they did and station manager got a good laugh when a 12-year-old showed up, but rest was history. They let me, in those days you had to have an FCC license, which was unclear whether a 12-year-old could get, but I got. So there we went.

Dave Reddy (04:32):

And first of all, you definitely break the record for earliest entry into journalism. What were you doing? Were you reading ads? Were you announcing news? No. Were you just a dj? What were you doing?

Jennifer Strong (04:44):

I mean, kind of none of the above. It was community radio, so I mean I was reading yard sale reports and having swap and shop where people call in and be like, Hey, I got a lawnmower. It's 50 bucks or something. There were bluegrass musicians who would come in. So I'd set them up in the studio and sometimes ministers, we have the Lost Dog report. The only thing they didn't have me keep doing was the obituaries because I don't know, I was so intimidated by this. I was a kid and I kept messing up everybody's names and so I'd apologize and I'd read the name a different way. I was like, maybe it's actually like this. Sorry you died.

Dave Reddy (05:20):

That's tough for 12-year-old, you still haven't quite wrapped your head around that.

Jennifer Strong (05:23):

Yeah, exactly. So no more obituaries after a couple of those.

Dave Reddy (05:27):

That is pretty intense and it's sort of interesting. I mean, so this was probably what nineties?

Jennifer Strong (05:34):

Yeah.

Dave Reddy (05:36):

Does this station still exist as it was? I feel like that's something that we no longer have that kind of community radio station.

Jennifer Strong (05:43):

Yeah, I mean it exists in name, but now it probably comes in over a satellite from somewhere. I have to actually stop and think about it would've been thinking about, when was I born? When was this? Was the eighties? It was like late eighties, early nineties I guess. And yeah, I don't think it really does. I love it. I was just camping in Maine last week and it seems like there's still a bit of that kind of FM radio there, more community based stuff, but yeah, so much of the radio landscape has really changed.

Dave Reddy (06:13):

Yeah, I mean I love Sirius. I love being able to from New England, I love being able to listen to a Bruins game or a Celtics game live, which I know two younger people sounds like, well, why wouldn't you be able to do that? Well, 20 years ago you couldn't do that.

But the unintended consequences of sort of destroying community radio is a shame. Talk to me. So it wasn't necessarily the news bug, but the broadcasting bug definitely hit you super early. What was that all about? Did you realize you had a nice voice or what was

Jennifer Strong (06:46):

It in those days? No, I had a weird voice. I had a girl voice and they didn't care so much in community radio, but boy did I take some heat going once. I did transition to news later on. But the training of the voice to fit more of that, I don't know, standard sound, it wasn't until podcasting when I was finally free just to talk like myself again, but it was storytelling is what it was. I loved a good story and it took me until college to even realize that it could be called journalism, to be honest. Even though my earliest memories of this and part of what drew me to it was sitting around watching 60 Minutes with my grandparents and my parents and it was like the stories that brought everybody together that next week, your neighbors would know these stories and it was like a shared history, a shared something. I feel like we're missing that now too, honestly.

Dave Reddy (07:37):

Certainly. And look, the Lost Dog report is journalism. It just is. That's information that people need to hear in a certain way. Now you went off to Gardner Web, pretty sure you're our first ever gardener web. I tell people where Gardener Web is and what led you there.

Jennifer Strong (07:54):

It's a one stoplight town, about an hour in any direction from Asheville or Charlotte. Honestly, I was first generation to go straight off to college. I had no idea what I was doing, but they had that tiny town with one stoplight, had a 50,000 watt radio station and could be heard far and wide. I loved radio. I had the radio bug and they offered me a job and the school offered me a scholarship. So that was done. We had no savings or plan for this, so that that,

Dave Reddy (08:24):

That'll do it.

Jennifer Strong (08:25):

That did it.

Dave Reddy (08:26):

Yeah. I was also a first generation collegiate. I ended up, and we'll talk about this later, at a place you also ended up at, which was American University, but we'll get to that in a few minutes. So you majored in comms, which totally made sense. You minored in politics, which makes sense and religion. Are you a religious person or were you just interested in the topic?

Jennifer Strong (08:45):

I wanted to make sense of the world and I thought once I decided to go into journalism, I actually tried to make it a trio of politics, history and religion. But that if I could just get my arms around some of this, then I would be able to handle whatever stories came my way. And I largely think that's still true.

Dave Reddy (09:02):

You've made sense of the world if you could. Oh,

Jennifer Strong (09:03):

No, no, no, no. I think I was going to say,

Dave Reddy (09:06):

If you explain the world to me, I think this would be the highest rated podcast of all time. Oh,

Jennifer Strong (09:11):

No doubt. I thought if you could get comfortable with complexity and if you could take a moment to sort of understand a conflict from the perspective of where everybody was coming from, you'd have a better shot when you were dropped into whatever situation. I thought I was going to be a work correspondent, to be honest. That's really what I thought would happened, and it's not what happened. I got close a couple times. Yeah, I think now as mom of teenagers and on this tech beat a minute, I am probably not headed to war zones, but I've been in a fighter jet, so I have covered plenty of military and various AI applications in all kinds of settings.

Dave Reddy (09:50):

We'll get to that in a moment, but I'm sensing a pattern that you remained the hardest working amateur journalist all through college. You worked at a local radio station, which I guess was the station you mentioned the 50,000 watt station. I take it you weren't in college to party.

Jennifer Strong (10:04):

Yeah, no, you're missing all the odd jobs that I did too in there. See, I did local television as well, but that was paying I think $20 for a package that was fully edited. I shot my own video, all that stuff, and radio was three, four bucks an hour. So in order to make rent after I had my tuition covered, but I worked a number of different jobs. I delivered newspapers. I worked a roadside vegetable stand, actually learning how to gauge how much things weighed by hand, hopefully accurately. And I was a greeter at Blockbuster video. Although I will say that job ended kind of strangely. There was some people coming in to rent a movie and I'm making the recommendation and the guy's like, aren't you that girl on television? And I'm like, yep, would be me.

Dave Reddy (10:57):

Okay. History question. There's only one blockbuster left. Where is it?

Jennifer Strong (11:01):

Oh, I have no idea.

Dave Reddy (11:03):

Bend Oregon. Oh, go figure. Why?

I don't know. It may be gone by now, but I know as of a couple years ago it was there. So to all of our, anyone listening in Oregon, you can still go rent a movie. Okay, so you got your master's at the greatest university in the world. My alma mater, the American University in dc. So at this point, I know you'd been to New York, I know you'd been to Brazil, but for the most part you'd experienced sort of small town life. How did you enjoy or DC experience or an American's case? The edge of DC experience right there next to Bethesda?

Jennifer Strong (11:39):

I loved it. I've lived in DC multiple times. I've worked for that same station for WAMU multiple times. It was my first time on air in a good size market, that's for sure. And I slowly, it was a bit because I'd had these experiences, right? I had been all over and I was used to doing all kinds of things. It took a minute for them to figure out exactly where I belong. I trained as an audio engineer there. And so for a while I would, if you remember the Diane Ream show, when that was on the air. So I worked on that show. I helped put it on the web. Actually, it was another job I did there when everybody was just starting to move news programming and things over. I did reporting there. I eventually worked my way up to being the news editor before I left for the Wall Street Journal.

And I came back over the years too, even when I was living in different places, because I had this affinity for the bluegrass, there was bluegrass programming there for a couple generations. And as some of the elder statesmen at the station passed on, and I dunno if you remember Ed Walker too, who was the first blind person in radio, is actually the person who started WAMU, which remains one of the largest public radio stations in the United States. But I did their memorials for each of them too, from New York or San Francisco or wherever I was. So yeah, I have a big soft spot for that station.

Dave Reddy (12:53):

That station was on the American campus. Do you know if it's still there or have they moved it? Oh

Jennifer Strong (12:57):

Yeah. No, no, no. It was there when Ed Walker built it, but they moved it to Tenleytown. I don’t know what year, but I was there in the early two thousands the first time, and they were in Tenleytown. And then when I returned to DC, they had moved to Van Ness and that's where they still are now.

Dave Reddy (13:11):

Got it. Tenleytown is about a mile, a mile and a half down the road from the main American campus. Cool Little area again.

Jennifer Strong (13:18):

Well, cool little building too. If I remember this correctly, correct me if I'm wrong, I think they moved into the Old East German intersection. There was this penthouse a top of the radio station where there had been because it was right next to, and Tenleytown is where the switchboard was for the White House. Again, I mean I assume people wouldn't lie to me, but this is what I was told and that they would eavesdrop from up there, but this penthouse area that couldn't be used, it was like a fire hazard or something that reporters would go up there and check out the views. And in theory anyway, it used to be a spying spot in DC lore.

Dave Reddy (13:52):

Yeah. I'm wondering if the entire time you were working out of the former East German radio or area or whatever as a radio station, if you were being listened to by who knows who, the wall had fallen by then, but probably still on the walls. So you were working for public radio and NPRI believe is the national. How would you describe NPR R'S approach to journalism? I know sometimes it gets made fun of on Saturday Night Live, but what did you learn from that approach? Oh,

Jennifer Strong (14:23):

I learned to be really careful and boys, it served me well, especially given the various places I worked. Since they take all of the integrity, the rules, the ethics, very, very seriously. And I got mentoring that you cannot get now. I worry actually a lot for people coming up in this field behind us where they're going to get, nobody's on the phones. You're not listening to the guy next to you who's been doing this for 20 years, shouting at somebody on the phone or solving problems. And so you just have to sort of sort all these things out for yourself now. And I thought I was the luckiest person ever. I produced a business show for NPR at the same time that I was also working as a morning. When I say I had all these different hats, I was the Saturday morning host and a DriveTime producer for WAMU while I was also producing an NPR show about business and personal finance for the weekend programming. And yeah, I got to experience all kinds of things.

Dave Reddy (15:17):

So you were a Jill of all trades. You freelanced for almost 10 years. I don't want to make an assumption, but was that because you were raising the kids or were you just enjoying being a contract?

Jennifer Strong (15:27):

Oh god, freelancing is brutal. I don't know who enjoys freelancing, but I mean, so was waking up at 2:00 AM to do morning drive. I was a full-time radio anchor for Dow Jones and WSJ Radio in oh 4, 0 5 oh somewhere up until my daughter was born in 2007. Also I'd been, when I stepped back to freelance, I was working on documentary stuff. I was doing deeper dives. I was doing smiling longer thesis for the BBC and also national security projects for PRI. And so I liked anchoring. It was fun, but it lost over time. Some of the shine, the waking up at 2:00 AM with an infant was probably not going to be my favorite task. To then make Atari jokes with the guys, I was ready to do slightly more serious work and also really spend time with the kids. I had three kids in four years and just really focused on them.

Dave Reddy (16:18):

You went back to the Wall Street Journal I believe in 2016?

Jennifer Strong (16:22):

Yeah, I went back freelance in 15 and then I was there, I think 16 to 19.

Dave Reddy (16:28):

And I believe this is where you got your first largely tech role producing the future of everything. Am I right on that? And can you tell us about the future of everything?

Jennifer Strong (16:37):

Oh, well, I mean, actually I made the first podcast for the journal when I was still in the radio unit. I created and anchored the tech briefing in like 5 0 6. And then that went away and came back and yeah, what can I say about the future of everything? Let's see. It was that same thing I'd been working on long form and just different deeper dives and I didn't mind to newscast, but it wasn't my whole goal. So I helped them. We launched minute briefing, we launched some other, we revamped tech news briefing and what's news, but I was publishing seven podcasts a day and just jumping between, yeah, jump in the studio, talk to a reporter X, by the way, this was what I suggested when I was there in oh five. It's like, okay. But in those days it was a real pain in the butt to get a podcast or digital audio.

And the uploads we were doing, they were like 12 minutes long. It took forever to download. It was done the night before. So anybody who was paying extra to get access to the tech section of the Wall Street Journal and the D live in those days, I'm like, you gave them the closing NASDAQ numbers, but it's like noon tomorrow and they already read the paper they paid extra for. So why are we just reading parts of the paper? Can we just talk to the reporter who wrote it? What are you watching for next? What happened? What did you not say in the article? You wanted to, let's have a conversation. And so that was what I was getting to do in 1516. I got called back by one of my old managers. It was great. Went in. I was still at that point also doing a lot of international reporting, mostly from New York, but covering the race for outlets abroad and then also working on documentary future of everything was born when I was basically ready to leave the journal again, not because I didn't love them, but I didn't feel the need to make seven podcasts a day about whatever update happened on the hill.

There wasn't a ton. By 2017, it was time for something new and the journal was the one place that I could do AI and quantum computing and all this stuff because this is radio death. Who wants to hear that? The idea was that you couldn't make it interesting. And I was on a mission to prove them wrong, and I felt like I did. I was the only person on that podcast when it launched. I had to mix it myself. I had to pick the music and mix that in myself. I had to add the ads even that was it. My boss was my editor and we couldn't do a tape sync even because the journal had some interesting rules about all of that, which later changed. But at the time it was this, well, how would you know that the sound was authentic if you didn't experience it, record it yourself, et cetera.

So what else I can tell you about it? I refused to use studios for the most part. I just thought for one, their studios at the time were built for AM radio and didn't sound great on an AirPod. And two, it was just more interesting. This stuff doesn't exist yet a lot of times, but their labs did. And it was more interesting to go to the field, go on fishing boats or wherever people were factory floors, hear the sound of the compressor for the quantum computer that they're trying to build, get in a plane and look out at a mountain range and try to understand how quantum annealing worked from that visual perspective. And it was fun. We got tens of millions of downloads we went to. I think we were in the top five for a short time on top charts. And then everybody paid attention. Then it was no longer when I was in a sea of a thousand people and the one person with no budget making this gig on the side, nobody cared. I could do whatever I please. And then it was like, Ooh, wait a minute. All eyes are on this.

Dave Reddy (20:03):

Well, at least you can call yourself a pioneer, I guess. So you're in New York, you're doing this all while living in New York at this point, correct?

Jennifer Strong (20:11):

Yes,

Dave Reddy (20:11):

Yes. And you mentioned that it got old at the journal and you went on to MIT Tech review, which I believe would be your first tech first audience.

Jennifer Strong (20:22):

Yes. And in some ways it was kind of the same job all over again. I don’t know if it got old. I was just, I'm entrepreneurial. I like to kind of try new things. I want to experiment. Remember I was with that business show I was making for N pr, that was the weekend experimental team and NPR had said no to a bunch of really cool things. Note that this American Life and Prairie Home Companion and Marketplace and all these shows are not made by NPR. They're made by other groups because they just weren't taking risks in those days. And with the future of everything, I got to build stuff, break stuff, take risks, and then it got different. They started to try to conform and to play a bit more inside their color, more inside the lines. And so editor who I admired very, very much, who went on to run wired and do other great things, but was running Tech Review at the time, and he and I hit it off.

I wanted to learn from him. So I got up there and quickly learned that they had, there was no infrastructure at all. That newsroom is itsy bitsy. I think it shrunk considerably after I got there. It had been 20, it was done, I don't know, 12 or something when I left. But there was no way to publish audio at all. And so I wasn't just at that point mixing it. I was trying to build everything to, at least I'd been through it and we were able to then expand. Eventually I made three different shows for them and also ran their live journalism team.

Dave Reddy (21:42):

Wow.

Jennifer Strong (21:43):

Yeah.

Dave Reddy (21:44):

In Machines We Trust was one of the shows, correct?

Jennifer Strong (21:48):

Yes.

Dave Reddy (21:49):

That is a cheesy game. So should we trust machines?

Jennifer Strong (21:51):

Oh, I just naming stuff, friend. Come on. Think about the names of the stuff I've made. The Extortion Economy, curious Coincidence, future of everything in Machines We Trust. If anything, I'm kind of a disappointment right now because my new show is just called Shift. But yeah, no, machines Grew, which was also kind of cool. It proved that I could do it because building a big show in a thousand person Newsroom is cool, but it's also, it's a big name and big market and Tech Review had never made anything, an audio. I was the only employee full-time on any of this stuff was not a foregone conclusion that we could build another show with millions of downloads where I was putting it together, hosting it, whatever else. And then sadly, so many other shows that got canceled last summer. And it was like we got a review in the New York Times. We got our second podcast Academy Award nomination, our sixth Webby nomination, and lost our jobs all the same week or the same time, I should say, rather

Dave Reddy (22:54):

Critically acclaimed as they say. Yes,

Jennifer Strong (22:57):

The Pulitzer Prize winner for audio that year also got laid off. So I think we were in fine company, but well,

Dave Reddy (23:02):

Everybody's getting laid off in journalism, so let's talk about that a little bit. So been laid off myself. It's never fun, but you seem to have made something out of it. So how did you get from, I got laid off despite the fact that I was putting something quality together to shift. How did that come about?

Jennifer Strong (23:22):

Well, as part of all the other things going on with machines, we'd been offered a distribution deal with public radio. And of course that didn't happen, but it did because I just took the deal and the team that made machines, we came up with a new concept. This is mostly scaled down in part because the ad market had also fallen apart, and we made the show for free for an entire year is the truth. And while we were growing up, I wasn't allowed to bring my RSS feed with me. That became a thing during the last three or four years. But MIT decided to hold onto it, and they're now using it for audiobook type stuff and our article reads or something. And so I had to build a new RSS from scratch, which as you know, takes more than a minute. So we're now up to about half the size or so of machines, which is great, given that I've had no money to market it or do much with it.

So that's how that happened. We launched the new show, but the truth of it also was the same week that we launched, I lost my father. I had a huge health scare last summer as well. I also landed a fellowship, which has been a huge gift working with the Pulitzer Center, but it was a very challenging time, just in the space of three months. A lot happened in my world. So I continued to make the oral history project that I started at MIT, and I'm looking now to place those into a museum sometime probably this fall, to start having a more interactive element to shift. And I do a lot of live events, and as long as it's a live event where it's like it's, it's not a compromise. I'm not going to go be paid to mc for somebody and then go put them on the air. That's not how journalism works. But I will be at something like some event worldwide where it is journalism, and I'll put that into the feed. I actually have a documentary about to go out with some NPR stations in days, weeks. I need to soon, I guess we'll say. And we'll be, it's called the Race for Super Intelligence, the Race to Super Intelligence. So that'll be going out. That's more like the work I did on machines. So it's a little deeper dive grant supported work. So that'll be going out soon.

Dave Reddy (25:33):

Well, tell me a little bit about that. Go ahead and plug away.

Jennifer Strong (25:35):

Oh, well, I mean, I don't know how to plug away because it's actually, it's like NPR news directors who get to decide which stations are running it, so I can plug away to everybody else, but I don't, they have to ask their public radio station for now until I can put it out on an RSS. But that is just trying to give everybody permission to ask what is AI and what is it really? And what about this moment is really special? What about it have we seen before? And to build out from there in future hours. So it's a one hour documentary. We're going to be looking at things like hiring. That's something I spent a lot of time on in the past looking at AI and hiring. We also will probably have an hour on facial recognition. Boy, the reporting on that has been an amazing full circle too.

I was in Africa also the same month that I officially lost my job, lost my dad, and launched a show and in a place where I'd spent the last four years talking about how facial recognition didn't work on dark skin or women. And here I was in Rwanda where a lot of the government, it's women, a lot of the men died during the genocide. And so a lot of the leadership, so I was with women building these systems that absolutely worked on black people who are the population there. And it was just like, I don't know, like I said, a big full circle moment for me. And I feel like there's a lot to be said now about that technology.

Dave Reddy (26:52):

Oh, you are pretty resilient. Where'd you learn that

Jennifer Strong (26:57):

Trial by fire?

Dave Reddy (26:59):

Yeah, I guess that's how we all learn it, I suppose. Yeah. Let's talk about AI because you obviously know more about it and have more experience with it and longer experience since you were thinking about it and doing it back in 20 16, 20 17 before everybody decided it was popular. One of the questions we ask everybody, and I think you can answer it perhaps with the most experience, is, should we to go back to your own, the name of your former podcast, should we trust this stuff?

Jennifer Strong (27:31):

I mean, the honest answer is like, should you trust a hammer? I mean, it's a tool. You can use it wisely and with caution and accountability or you can really mess stuff up. I think we should ask a lot of questions. And I love trust. I think of myself as kind of a student of the word now, as weird as that might sound, just like what it means to trust, to not trust what the tech and all these context means for the big things like the future of our democracy. There's so much there really to dig into. If there's anything though that I can encourage any journalist listening or communications person listening, please, you're part of this conversation. We are all AI journalists now. It does not matter whether you work in healthcare or media, automotive, supply chain. This is everywhere. And we should all be asking real questions about our work and how we can do this more thoughtfully than we may have otherwise. I mean, again, I always use the same analogy, sorry. It's like you need to drive to know that we need seat belts, and so there's going to be recalibration. It doesn't mean somebody's a bad actor necessarily, it's just that we're learning as we go, but we need to learn from what we find and we need to ask good questions.

Dave Reddy (28:53):

Sounds like you're asking, you mentioned earlier you're a Pulitzer fellow and you are to be specific, if I got this right, a Pulitzer Fellow for AI accountability. So you're on a think tank, I guess, trying to figure out some of these really

Jennifer Strong (29:05):

Important, well, kind of, it meant that I had grant money to go after some of it and then think about what we needed to see in the world. That's how, that's the Pulitzer Center funded this documentary for NPR stations with this in mind that people don't feel like they know enough to be involved in the moment we're living in. But if we don't all participate in this, it's going to be really hard if we don't all take some ownership for the world we're living in right now and realize that we're all in this together. Yeah, so that's really what that was about, was just a moment for everyone to feel invited to the table because we should all be at the table. This is not a couple of people getting to decide the future of everybody else shouldn't be anyway. And for accountability, I think there used to be some idea to back that up and say, the future hasn't happened yet.

So anybody can say whatever they want and you can't really argue with them because it hasn't happened yet. We don't know. So that's a hard rabbit hole to really go down, but you can look at the ways that things are being used right now and ask good questions. It used to be like with a product that if somebody advertised it for specific use, you kind of assumed certain things. With one of my reporting partners, and I mentioned spend a long time on AI and hiring. We were testing products over at NYU. That one was supposed to give you a score on your English proficiency. And we were playing with this. And over time, my reporting partner, she's German, and she was getting scores speaking German, and we thought, well, maybe it's so smart, it's translating her words. So her lab assistant spoke Chinese and got pretty great scores that speak in English, and we're calling up experts from various universities. Is it cognates? Is it finally we call up the CEO, who laughs? And he's like, no, no, no. It's checking your vocal confidence. How confident are you that you speak good English?

Dave Reddy (30:56):

Oh, I see.

Jennifer Strong (30:57):

And I guess Chinese sounds pretty confident and German,

Dave Reddy (31:03):

It sounds more confident than German,

Jennifer Strong (31:05):

Right? So I think that from his point of view, people, he said people were happy, they were hiring people they wouldn't have considered or candidates they wouldn't have considered otherwise. And I thought, okay, but do they speak English? If that's the stated objective for a call center Then? And also for me to talk about that think tanky big aha moment was going, oh, wait, didn't we, the whole point of this was that we were going to make things more fair and the most confident dude in the room was not going to walk in and get the job. But we've sort of just brought it a whole full circle again, and now we're back where we started, but with a lot of confidence behind it because well, the computer said. So

Dave Reddy (31:42):

You've talked a lot about ai and you briefly spoke about all of us being AI journalists or all of you. I'm an AR PR guy. I guess, how is AI affecting journalism and are you concerned about it? Are you happy about it? A little bit of both.

Jennifer Strong (31:57):

I am concerned and curious about everything. That's just how I'm wired. But I'm also optimistic, and forgive me. Well, I quoted another journalist, but years back, the late great Jim Laro said to me, oh, but Jim, we're all optimists. And I kind of laughed. I thought, yes. Oh, as optimistic journalists, sure. And he's like, no, think about it. If we didn't really believe that we could make things better, if there was no point to this job, we'd go do something else. So we're in it because we believe that if somebody just understands the problem, then you can fix it. So yeah, I am optimistic and I spend enough time with AI to know the ways in which it's still pretty stupid. So I am not, I'm concerned about disinformation. I'm also optimistic about some of the tools that are being developed to fight disinformation. I don't think that we are going to all suddenly be replaced. I think it's, remember a couple of years ago when they said that nobody should study radiology because those jobs are going to go away in a hot minute, and instead, we wound up with a world shortage of radiologists, but it wasn't because AI was bad. In fact, the AI has been great radiology. Our readings of those reports are now better than ever because computer vision can see things our eyes. But you need the human, and maybe that won't always be the case, but I'm not writing us off yet.

Dave Reddy (33:23):

So after all that very serious talk, my final question, as I often ask, Tennessee, North Carolina, Washington DC or New York City, or perhaps somewhere else since you've

Jennifer Strong (33:36):

Been, yeah, it's somewhere else. I am thinking coastal Maine. That sounds good to me right now. I was there last week and it was stunning.

Dave Reddy (33:44):

Well, as a New Englander, I can't disagree with that. Jennifer Strong, thank you so much. An extremely thoughtful conversation and on AI and on journalism, a lot to think about. For those of us who listened, including myself to what you just said, and I really appreciate your time.

Jennifer Strong (34:00):

This has been my absolute pleasure. Thanks so much, Dave.

Dave Reddy (34:04):

Thanks, Jennifer. I'd like to thank you all for listening today, and once again, a big thank you to our guest, Jennifer Strong of the Shift podcast. Join us next month when we interview another member of the B2B Tech Top 200. In the meantime, if you've got feedback on today's podcast or if you'd like to learn more about Big Valley Marketing and how we identified the B2B tech Top 200, be sure to drop me an email at d ready@bigvalley.co. That's DE double D at Big BigValley, all one word.co. No M. You can also email the whole team at pressing matters@bigvalley.co. Once again, thanks for listening. And as always, think big.