I am focused on the evolv­ing infra­struc­ture of jour­nal­ism and the emerg­ing busi­ness mod­els that will sup­port it. I play a lead role in the Knight News Chal­lenge, which is giv­ing away $25 mil­lion in grants to sup­port news inno­va­tion over five years. I chime in and help other media com­pa­nies too.

My cur­rent hypoth­e­sis re busi­ness mod­els is that news orga­ni­za­tions need to both nur­ture and hop into the cycle of local-to-local Internet-enabled com­merce. I think marketing/promotion has to shift away from dis­play adver­tis­ing. I believe news agen­cies might have to cre­ate an agency model of help­ing local busi­nesses. There­fore I am inter­ested in talk­ing to start-ups or any­one else who can offer some per­spec­tive, espe­cially from the van­tage point of adver­tis­ers or small businesses.

I was a reporter at The New York Times for nine years, where I cov­ered tech­nol­ogy, Wash­ing­ton, crime, poverty and cul­ture. I spent the last two of those years report­ing and exper­i­ment­ing on City Room, the Times’ New York City metro blog. I also work on social media.

I have a talk on TED.com on Gen­eral Tso’s chicken and sur­vived an inter­view by Stephen Col­bert. I’ve also made dumplings on Martha Stew­art and for the Today Show dur­ing the 2008 Bei­jing Olympics. All that came from a book I wrote called The For­tune Cookie Chron­i­cles, which hit #26 on the New York Times best­seller list.

NPR called me a “con­cep­tual scoop artist,” in part because of a pop­u­lar story I did on the “man date.” I was user 1324 on Face­book and have my own ver­sion of the red­dit alien (also known as “snoo”). I was listed in the GQ Women We Love issue.

I received my degree in applied math and eco­nom­ics at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity (where I was vice pres­i­dent of The Har­vard Crim­son) and then went to Bei­jing Uni­ver­sity for a year on fel­low­ship and stud­ied inter­na­tional relations.

As a result of those col­lege com­puter sci­ence classes, I like to tin­ker with python, which is an ele­gant lan­guage. But I have long dis­cov­ered I am not a debug­ger. I am a prod­uct person.